Great Customer Service – The Holy Grail
Let’s start with a few important questions:
1. How do you provide effective online help/faqs at the point of need, for the Library’s many systems and services – everything from the Website, to the Catalog, to the Discovery/Search system, to the variety of E-Database and E-book platforms, etc.
2. How do you solicit and manage ideas and feedback from patrons, regarding these Library’s systems? Wouldn’t it be great to know what patrons think of your systems and how to improve them?
3. Last but not least, how do you keep your community informed and up to date about these aforementioned systems? Are any systems having problems at the moment, and if yes what are they? What are the new features? When is the scheduled maintenance? What are the top ideas for improvement?
Your library provides many services via many systems, and the number of these systems & services increases every year. Providing effective help to patrons on how to use these systems, and ensuring patrons’ voices are heard and their product questions answered is essential to the library’s success. Keeping users informed about your systems and services, and receiving feedback – be it ideas, suggestions, praise, or negative feedback, and responding in an organized and timely manner – that’s what great customer service is all about.
How we help you get there
We did what we’ve been doing for libraries since 2007 – clients told us they have a big problem so we developed a tool to help solve it, and delight their patrons to boot! We created this new tool as part of the existing platform libraries already use to answer patrons’ questions – LibAnswers, of course! With the new “Systems & Services Management” functionality inside the LibAnswers platform you can do three new things:
1. Systems Help Widgets: Create product-specific Help widgets (for the Website, the Catalog, the Discovery/Search platform, for any E-Database platforms, E-book platforms etc…), and embed them directly inside the given product. If a patron is in the catalog and they need help, they get catalog-specific help with a click of a button. Need help while using the Discovery/Search platform? Help is right there, along with all other Discovery-related faqs, feedback, etc. You get the idea – you can do this for any product or service within your library. Patron questions & feedback are fed into the LibAnswers dashboard and you answer them like any other question/ticket in LibAnswers. You also get awesome statistics on how much support each product generates.
2. Systems Feedback Manager: These product-specific widgets also have a built-in feedback mechanism for patrons to send feedback, questions, ideas, and praise right inside the product they’re using. It doesn’t get any more convenient than this! And, any idea/feedback/praise goes directly into the LibAnswers dashboard so librarians can organize it and answer (if needed) right from the system they already use to answer patrons’ questions.
3. Systems Status Dashboard: LibAnswers now gives you patron-facing public “status dashboard” pages outlining the status of every library system and service. The status dashboard is also an embeddable widget so you can plug it into any webpage or a blog. The dashboard shows the current status of each system but also goes deeper and shows any new feature announcements, scheduled maintenance times, community top-voted product ideas, etc. Keep your patrons up to date about every library system, in real-time. The “internal” status update posts can be used by library staff for internal communication.
You have to see this in action, it’s going to transform the way you manage your library systems – check out the 5 minute video below (it will open in a new window). We will start rolling out this new LibAnswers functionality over the next few weeks – contact us for more details.
