Foolproof Way to Increase Accuracy in Chat Reference
I wanted to share with all of you two great posts from Marie Radford over on the Library Garden blog. She shares some core results of her recent research for the Seeking Synchronicity project, as presented during the recent ALA Annual Conference.
http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/2007/07/ala-redux-ready-reference-in-chat-not.html
http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/2007/07/are-we-getting-warmer-query.html
A highlight: What's the most foolproof way to increase the accuracy of the service you provide in chat reference? "Before you push a general information page, make sure it has the specific, exact answer to the user’s question."
This may be common sense to many of us, but if someone asks for the capital of Argentina we need to be prepared to both (1) show them a reliable resource (how about The World Factbook page on Argentina) AND (2) let them know that, according to this page the capital is Buenos Aires. When the librarian only does the first part and only vaguely suggests that the answer is on the page (not accomplishing part 2), we here in Maryland also tend to see sessions of these type end up as bad experiences for the customer. In these cases the customer is expecting an answer - and they should be able to get one from us!
-Joe
3 comments:
Good point Joe. People have different abilities with scanning through a page of info for the answer, especially some young people, low-literate adults, or people with learning differences. Another thing we can do is point out where on the page the answer is (e.g. "if you scroll about halfway down and look under the heading Occupations, you'll see that women in the middle ages[supply answer]...") Sometimes this may seem too cumbersome and at the very least, after sending a site that contains the answer, we should check with the person to make sure they were able to discern the info needed from the page.
--Deborah
Deborah, I really like seeing the kind of direction given in a session too. Building on that idea, the librarian can send the URL to the customer of the particular point on the page that they want the customer to see, if the page uses bookmarks. A bookmark URL usually has the pound symbol ("#") in it. It points to a particular place on a web page.
A good example is this page on the BCPL site: http://www.bcpl.info/libpg/aboutyourlibrary.html
If the customer wanted to know about wireless access in the branches, it would be even better for the librarian to send the bookmarked URL for that particular section of the page, rather than the main URL. The topics that have been bookmarked are all listed at the top of the page. So if the librarian clicks on the topic, "Wireless Internet Access / Wi-Fi" they will be jumped down the screen. In their browser's Address bar the librarian will see the URL change to: http://www.bcpl.info/libpg/aboutyourlibrary.html#Wireless
The librarian could then copy and paste that URL to send to the customer so that they can see the specific info that they were looking for - right in front of them without needing to scroll.
-Joe
yes definitely if the site is constructed that way, it's best to send them right to the info! And another option is to cut and paste the answer into the chat text box, and though we don't want to paste too much text, I think it is preferable to leaving them lost in a sea of text...
Just the other day I had an experience as a consumer of information where the provider did not tell me "the answer", but sent a link instead with a long document (this was an email exchange, rather than a live chat). I actually inferred the wrong answer since I didn't know the proper section in which to look!
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