Meebo
This is a recap some of the points I made at the Reference Instruction meeting on Wednesday regarding the Meebo chat widget.
- We should anticipate an increase in the number of chats we receive at the desk when our new website is rolled out.
- For the time being, Bio-Med chat will only be available during Reference Desk hours, though this may change in the future.
- Please record chats as accurately as possible in Desk Tracker in order for staff to analyze chat content for future training. Please highlight and copy the full transcript of the chat when complete and paste it into the Notes field in Desk Tracker.
- Meebos Notifier has been installed at HSL-Ref-A. Click the Notifier icon to bring up Meebo on the web. It is also still OK to open Meebo directly on the web.
- Some useful chat phrases that I have memorized and can type like the wind are:
- "Hi, my name is Emily. Let me start looking for the answer to your question." An alternative is, "Hi, my name is Emily. Can you give me a bit more information on X....?"
- At the end of a chat, "Is there anything else I can help you with?*" and "Thanks for using our chat service. Stop back if you have additional questions."
- To terminate a problem chat, I use, "This chat is inappropriate and will now be terminated." Fortunately, this doesn't come up very often.
I believe this is all fairly straightforward (and possibly even painfully obvious), so thanks for getting this far! If you have any comments, questions or feedback, we are eager to hear it. Finally, I haven't forgotten about our stats discussion, and I'll address that in another post later today or on Monday.
Cheers,
Emily
*http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/CMS_FAQ/Prepositions/Prepositions04.html