If your library answers in-person patrons before IM patrons…
If your library tells email reference customers they have to wait any more than 1 hour for an answer…
If your library pushes people to use analog reference services instead of digital ones…
If your library treats digital customers like second-class citizens…
Thank you, DLK, for a good kick in the pants for this profession.
January 21st, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I like the spirit of it, in terms of serving everyone. But as an IT Librarian sometimes I really wonder if this 2.0 stuff is just a way for Public Service Librarians to do only the work they like. I once worked with someone who ignored customers at the desk so she could finish her website. And I’ve been told off (by customers) before for not ending a phone call sooner to take care of the person standing in front of me. So, how do you justify answering an IM (or the phone) before the person who is waiting there, staring at you, wondering if it has something to do with their appearance, race, age? Talk about discrimination.
January 21st, 2009 at 6:14 pm
One thing about this that bugs me. I’ll illustrate it with a question. What if a patron sent you a reference question by mail? As in, snail mail. It was in an envelope. Would it be good customer service to write out a response to that person, do their research, etc, while a line of people waited for you to finish?
My point is this: IM and email are both multitask-friendly media. If you fire off an email to the reference desk, you are not forced to sit there hitting “refresh” and doing nothing else until the answer gets back. You can go off and do other things. Similarly, the IM patron will be free to open other chats, work on something else, for a few moments.
However this does not apply to patrons who are right there with you. They have invested their time to be present. They will not be carrying on other tasks while you assist them. From my perspective it’s reasonable to meet them halfway – they’ve invested more of their time so they deserve slightly quicker attention.
Of course this doesn’t mean IM or email or phone patrons can be treated like 2d class citizens. It just means they’re not directly equivalent to in-person patrons. It’s more complicated than a simple 1:1 correspondence. Therefore it’s unfair to draw an analogy like “It would be intolerable to send some patrons to the back of the line, therefore it’s wrong to make them wait an hour for an email back”
What this says to me is that answering Email and IM queries should NOT be done at the same service desk that handles in-person questions, if possible. Even something as simple as moving to a non-public-workstation would eliminate a lot of the conflict.
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:25 am
To answer Eric’s question: You communicate with the user, telling them that you are helping a patron online, just as you would say (“I’ll be with you in just a moment, I’m on the phone with someone…”). How is it different? There isn’t as obvious a physical signal with online transactions as there is with phone transactions. However, if you’ve moved to the “computer face-out” method of reference desks (instead of the traditional “I’m on this side, you’re on that side” model), then your user could see that you were busy working with someone else. I’ve also seen libraries use signage on the desk noting when they’re with an online patron to help in-person patrons understand. As for the library staff member who worked on her website instead of helping a user, that is just plain unacceptable customer service, is a personnel disciplinary issue, and to me has nothing to do with providing adequate and equatable virtual reference services.
To tkozak: I’ll quote from your comment where you provide an alternative scenario where virtual users have to wait for service: “It just means they’re not directly equivalent to in-person patrons.” This is exactly my point. They are equal. They are equivalent. They should get equal service. That’s how I feel, and I feel it very strongly as does the creator of the original post, David Lee King. Anyone is free to disagree, but think about what you are saying – patrons are unequal. How is that all right under any circumstances?
January 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
“If your library tells email reference customers they have to wait any more than 1 hour for an answer…”
I saw David Lee King’s post linked in other blogs earlier in the month, and I’m still struggling with what we, as librarians, are supposed to do if it simply isn’t feasible to supply an answer within an hour? Due to the process involved with our incoming reference emails (they go to a shared mailbox, and some go through our parent agency first and are forwarded in bunches to us -government library here), many emails aren’t even seen within an hour of receiving them. Sure, we send a ‘we received your question and are working on it’ message when we see the question and before assigning it to a reference librarian, but it can sometimes be a couple of hours before that even happens.
When that message gives a time frame for a response, it’s five business days. Because it really can take that long to take care of questions that came in first, and to find resources for a response for the historical and/or in-depth questions. While I personally often can respond to most questions I receive in under an hour of work, I’m probably the quickest of the reference librarians here (sometimes I wonder if I’m missing something important as a result!).
For us, the difference between on-site patrons and email is that those on-site can poke around the catalog and request books to go through on their own time -the librarian doesn’t necessarily have to sit with them while they sort through subject headings and journal indexes. Email patrons, on the other hand, don’t have the resources available to them (especially those who are rural/in other countries), so we have to sift through the information for them in order to provide the best possible answer/information. I don’t really understand how it is discriminatory to the email patrons to have them wait a few days in cases like this, since they know we received their question and are given a time frame in which to expect our answer.
But maybe I’m missing the point. I don’t know. This has been bothering me, though, because I’d love to make our patrons happier by providing quicker answers. I just don’t think it’s plausible in our particular situation.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:14 pm
email and IM and any other patron not in front of me are 100% second-class citizens because they did not make the effort to come see me. there is no other answer. those patrons take the most time to answer and demand the most work. here is my latest email: can I have the book value of my car for the last ten years? for the walk in patron, I would hand them ten years of KBB, but for the email patron, I have to scan ten pages into a PDF and email them: time to answer question, 45 minutes. the email and askalibrarian patrons are the most helpless customers: they email to ask what our hours are… hmm, the hours are on our web page which is two whole clicks fewer than it took to email me. they don’t want help to find things as much as they want everything done for them. when online patrons ask the same questions as in house patrons, the get exactly the same service. but they rarely do. visiting a library creates reasonable expectations for services, but clicking a link and sending a message only creates unrealistic expectations that all information is available instantly: look, I clicked send, so what’s taking so long with my answer. I spend about two hours a day answer maybe 4-5 emails when I could help 15-20 in house patrons. because handing the in house patron a resource is usually the end of the transaction; I don’t need to transfer all the information from one source (KBB) to another format (PDF). so I would argue that No, the in house patron is the one who gets short-changed because they can’t make these demands: what? ask me to scan all these pages for you and email them? Never. There’s the copier right over there; and it’s 10 cents a page. so the email patron should wait for this extra no-fee service that in house patrons *never* get. (tell me the last time a patron handed you a book and asked you to scan ten pages and email them and you said okay, right away! I bet never.) (…not angry, just trying to make my point.)
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
In a perfect world we’d have the staff and tech infrastructure to answer questions as they came in. To search until complete answers are found. We’re not living in a perfect world. When we are, I’d enjoy giving service as described in the post.
January 26th, 2009 at 6:54 am
Hmmm….In my library, We answer in person first, on the most part, when at the Ref Desk and leave e-ref to one person who does that primarily & all day long.
I think if your community knows your library, they know that busy times may require a wait, but not because the people are losing precedence to IMs or Web stuff. To ignore the customer in front of you, who made the trip there, while answering the question of someone in their pajamas at home does not make sense. We would never do that.
Also, in my experience, IM does not mean they require immediate answers anymore. People tend to leave up IM screens all day and answer them as they can over the course of hours.
It probably depends a lot on the demands of your community, but I would take a number and call someone back if I had a person in front of me at the Ref Desk, and a caller. And I ALWAYS call back if I say I will, and always give a time frame. We are in the customer service business, and that’s just how I would want to be treated.
The web 2.0 stuff should never be an excuse to forego good customer service. Those libraries that do should re-think their mission.
January 26th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I agree that the more e-services can be turned over to people off of the physical desk the better. This allows all users to get equal treatment (hopefully), and for the staff not to be super-stressed. But if you are offering a service, you darn well better be prepared to back it up with equitable customer service. Otherwise you have to ask yourself the question if what you’re providing is of a high enough quality that you want the library’s name attached to it. Don’t do email reference, for example, if it takes you a week before even acknowledging the user’s question. It makes the library look bad, frustrates the customer, and has no point whatsoever other than allowing the library to say they “offer” something that they truly don’t offer.