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Put the ‘service’ in self-service.(intranet librarian)

Online January 1, 2008 | Fichter, Darlene; Wisniewski, Jeff Librarians are often on both sides of the virtual service desk. Sometimes we’re wearing our professional hat, developing online content, forms, and other objects to support users of our websites and portals. Sometimes, however, we’re in the position of being consumers of online services.

It’s a self-service world, but how well are librarians doing at embracing and providing outstanding self-service? Librarians have invested a lot of time and money in licensing full-text resources that help facilitate online self-service–but providing access is not enough. Although access can lead to some usage, resources are often underutilized and the best resources are overlooked. Online, we need to deliver great content and great service.

FACE-TO-FACE SERVICE As a profession, we often equate and value “high-touch” service with face-to-face relationships. We have not fully embraced designing excellent self-service experiences. Many colleagues don’t perceive our library websites as “real service.” Is your default response to self-service difficulties, “Have them call or come in?” Valid responses perhaps, but a better first response is looking at what caused the problem in the first place. What online tools, information, or functionality could address it? go to website adp self service

Nancy Fried Foster, anthropologist and co-editor of Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester, writes that she “learned that many of these librarians started in their professional careers at a time when there was a different kind of demand for their services … In 1966, when the average librarian of today was 10 years old, the Rochester phone book listed 116 meat markets and ten milliners (hat makers) … Specialization and personal attention prevailed twenty years after World War II and well into the Vietnam era. That was the milieu in which today’s average librarians formed their ideas of service.” In other words, part of our ambivalence toward self-service stems from how we formed our models of service, personally and professionally.

Contrast this with the average college freshman, who was born in 1988 when self-service was an established norm. The idea of knowing your baker or butcher and expecting someone to pump your gas has gone the way of the dodo bird.

Foster proposes that it’s these different models for service, more than time pressure, that drive the information-seeking student to try self-service options that may include Google, Wikipedia, and library online databases, but does not include seeking out a librarian for assistance. When students sketch a new library, it doesn’t include librarians at all.

As librarians move more and more content and services online, we need to be mindful of the fact that simply mounting content is not enough. We are thrilled to have thousands of ejournals available online, but have we thought about the students’ search experiences? Are we organizing and presenting content and services in an integrated way that supports self-service? Are we at the right level of granularity to meet their needs? Are we offering support and tools once users are online and experiencing bumps in the self-service road? Are we observing what our library website users do, monitoring emergent needs, actively asking for feedback, and adding intelligence into our self-service design?

DESIGNING A GREAT SELF-SERVICE EXPERIENCE What defines a great self-service experience or, for that matter, even a great service experience? Outcomes matter the most. Did you find what you were looking for? The journey is important, but without a successful outcome, users are not going to be delighted.

ATTITUDE Begin with the end in mind. What kind of experience do your users want to have? Have you made a commitment to providing a great self-service experience? Librarians with more “virtual visits” than face-to-face should put the same amount of time, human resources, and customer-focused design into online services that they’ve honed and refined over time for their face-to-face services.

Think beyond the content you’re making available to library users, to the attitude you want to project on the site. It’s critical to approach online customer service with the attitude that not only will we connect users with the information they need, we will attempt to exceed baseline expectations. Face-to-face, we strive to be friendly, approachable, and professional. We recognize that people have different learning styles and approaches. Thus, we try to deliver services for diverse needs and communities. We should apply this same attitude and commitment to the online environment.

Approach the library’s website, databases, and catalog holistically. The reality is that, even if our only expectation is to get users the information they need, the likelihood of failure exists. They won’t know where to start. They won’t recognize what container has the content they are seeking. They will get zero results from a database search or get hopelessly lost when they stumble unwittingly onto the subject heading search of a catalog. Most librarians operate in a universe where failure is an option, where searches fail, links to online forms break, and the chat reference software fails to load.

DESIGN Great online customer service does not happen by accident or simply because you’d like to offer it; it happens because you want it and because you’ve put in place the processes to make sure it happens.

On the design side, how about a failed search message that provides suggestions such as, “Were you searching for … ?” and shows terms with variant spellings (or suggests a subject search to replace the keyword)? How about preventing the failure by providing auto suggestion as users start to key in their terms in the search box? Yahoo! and Ask.com do this.

If users have two or more failed search results in a row, does this trigger an online chat widget with the option to talk to a live person or an online form to submit the request? While it’s true that much of our online universe, particularly the subscription-based information resources, are not within our direct control, we’ve not even asked, not to mention demanded, that this kind of intelligence be built into the system. Some of these actions and events can be built in with a day or two of programming provided by the vendor or by your own staff. A few years ago when we were designing live chat services, our programmers customized and inserted Live Chat buttons on some screens of licensed databases and the library catalog, adjacent to the search forms and in other locations to test where the placement worked best. It took less than a day to do this programming and then some testing and feedback to discover where the placement worked best. Spell-checking is another example. Only a handful of libraries have utilized Google’s Spell Check API’s on their website search and catalog.

What of the systems we do control? Do we ask users who access our catalog’s online help about their successes or failures? A simple two-question survey can be created and embedded into a page in minutes. If we ask people to provide feedback on specific pages on our website, we would quickly find that many of our students want information at a more granular level–what resources are best for a particular course.

One goal of academic librarians is to educate users about scholarly information resources, research strategies, and evaluating information. Our self-service information can foster information literacy, not by asking users to step outside the processes of discovery to take online tutorials, but by transparently incorporating elements into the user interface. For example, a two-column display of results similar to an Amazon A9 search result screen, which presents scholarly peer-reviewed articles on one side and popular magazine articles on the other, shows that there are two types of articles.

There are dozens of ways to build better user interfaces for library sites that inform as the user completes the self-service process. Consider how airline websites show various fare options, allowing for flexible dates and showing fares for the days before and after your preferred date. This design utilizes airlines’ knowledge of customer goals and desires.

Adding intelligence to design requires information gleaned from analyzing customer profiles and preferences. What differences exist among teams and disciplines? Look at log data on the paths through the site, feedback and requests, reference transactions face-to-face, and transactional information from catalogs and licensed databases. The once controversial use of cookies to offer personalization or to remember user preferences has gained widespread acceptance, so perhaps librarians need to revisit the issue. A request form prepopulated with some basic contact information, drawn from the cookie, would most likely be a welcome time-saver.

To help you imagine what the experience is like for your customer, try creating user scenarios or developing personas. A user scenario is a story incorporating specific user characteristics representative of your user community and the steps and tasks that they would undertake to reach a goal. Personas are archetypal users of your site that have particular goals and characteristics. Each persona represents real users. Although each one is “fictitious,” they are based on knowledge and the study of real users.

IMPLEMENTATION Focus the implementation phase on the processes of self-service, not just content delivery. There are multiple processes on websites, such as find, use, request, collect, store, learn, and repurpose. Integration is definitely a major challenge for librarians since content is often siloed. Federated search can break down some of the silos. Faceted search or visual browsers can help researchers find related concepts on their own narrow searches. go to web site adp self service

Being able to mark and store citations from several different databases in a tool like Refworks is an example of integration that allows users to do things they need to do at the appropriate point in the research process.

Implementation involves testing. You need to test the experience. There are lots of methods for getting input and feedback from users. Roll out your new designs and implementation to a group of users; text, fail fast, and learn. Be agile and adapt.

IMPROVEMENT To improve online customer service, be willing to do two things: Act quickly and fail. Agility is the name of the game. Too often we strive for perfection, not completion. A corollary is that because we overinvest we’re unwilling to fail. We’re loathe to walk away from an online service that took 14 months and two committees to get into production. Is your federated search tool meeting your users’ needs? There are many ways to get at this information: conduct usability tests, analyze your vendor-supplied usage logs, and search word logs. A quicker way to get a baseline idea is to insert a single question on your results page: Did you find what you needed? YES/NO. If you have a problem you’ll know quickly, and you can then take steps to delve more deeply and ultimately fix it.

We also need to be aware of where our users are headed. A challenge, indeed, as we’re not often sure of where they are now, but in order to plan for and deliver excellent online customer service, we need to understand what our users are doing online and to know their expectations, and then we must strive to meet their needs. After all, they don’t spend all their time on the library website.

Librarians are justifiably proud of the depth and breadth of online content offered to users. However, we need to move beyond feeling that the job is done once the content and a description of services is available. Librarians provide useful, friendly, and responsive service in the physical world, and we need to be sure we have that same commitment to service and support across the virtual worlds in which we operate as well.

Darlene Fichter (fichter@lights.com) is data library coordinator, University of Saskatchewan Libraries. Jeff Wisniewski (jeffw@pitt.edu) is web services librarian, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.

Fichter, Darlene; Wisniewski, Jeff