Patrons starting chat and leaving quickly

[Jen]

We've been having problems with patrons starting a chat and then leaving very quickly before we can respond. I'd really love to know if there's tricks other libraries are using that help patrons understand they may need to give librarians a minute or two to respond.

Our specifics, if it helps:
- Small academic library; most of the time we have one librarian assigned to chat, but that person is also responsible for being the point person for in-person interactions at the main information desk that student workers can't handle, so there are times we're gone for a minute or two. (About 10 feet away: we can hear the sound go for the chat.)

- Our chat is often very quiet - on a busy day, we might get two questions in a 2 hour desk shift, and there are lots of times we get none. We feel like it's a great outreach, and we've been getting more uses over time (and toward the end of semester), but it's obviously not the main way we interact with library users.

- People seem to respond well if we can get to them immediately, but often disappear if we don't get to them within the first 30-60 seconds. We've already started being clear with instruction classes (when we go over library tools) that they should give us a minute. That seems to be helping, but of course, not everyone hears it in an instruction session, or remembers it.

- We're not entirely opposed to having more than one person log in to chat as backup, but because of varying schedules/etc. it's really tricky to arrange a schedule of backup coverage. (Because people have varying meetings/etc. that change week to week.) If you're doing this, I'd be really curious how it works for you.

[Michael]

Here at Brigham Young University, a large academic library, we organize our chat a little differently. Our chat service is available all hours the library is open (7:00 a.m. to midnight). During the busy hours (9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.) the main queue is monitored primarily by permanent staff in their offices. The system is also open on the desk computers where student employees monitor the queue but only answer if they are not busy. This has proven to be very helpful because the desk often gets busy or the questions are beyond the help students can give. This is the way that we ensure the chat is answered in a timely fashion.

If you have further questions, feel free to contact me offline.

Michael

[Jessica Chaiken]

We're a small, special library with several information specialists. One of the ways we've improved use of our chat is to include the widget in our No Results database and 404 pages. We saw an increase of about 15% when we did that.

The canned responses in the web chat helped us greatly in being able to respond very quickly to incoming chats. All I have to type is He and it pulls up our standard "hello!..." intro. Hit enter and you've started your session.

You could edit the widget with some text at the top along the lines of "An information specialist is on the way! Please give us up to 1 minute to respond. We appreciate your patience!" along the lines of the hack to add a link to a feedback form (am I remembering that right?).

Something for the feature queue, perhaps, is to have the option for an intro script that pops in when the user starts a chat/opens a chat window. "Thank you for contacting us! Please feel free to type your question or additional information while the next available librarian takes your call." You could add your "We may take up to 1 minute to respond, your patience is appreciated" there.

---Jess

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