Proactive Chat: Ensuring client satisfaction

With increased use for e-tailing, chat has helped businesses increase online sales and customer satisfaction by providing an efficient solution that facilitates effective interaction with site visitors.  If the technology works so well for the marketing side of business, why don't we as librarians use it to increase our own clients' satisfaction? 

Imagine if librarians started utilizing proactive chat with digital library patrons.  For example, once a client closes out of the library portal, a chat window would pop up to ask "Have you found all that you needed?  Is there anything else I can help you with?"  In this case, there would be two chat strategies:

1. The library could utilize a chat bot/live agent combo.  Mundane library questions would be answered by chat bots that would rely on a conversational database.  Programming the bot to confirm the client's satisfaction with the answer, it could then forward those clients looking for extra help to a chat staffed by a librarian. 

2.  Forget the bot and have your library's information professionals take turns interacting with your digital clients over chat.  Since it might be impossible to interact with all of the researchers who access your digital information portal, randomly pick a few clients to throughout the day to chat with.  It would be a great way to engage your client base. 

Interested in learning more about chat bots in libraries?  The University of Hamburg library provided an excellent presentation at the 2006 Access Conference.  You can click here to get it in PDF.

If you would like to try the technology out for yourself, I've included a link to the Artificial Intelligence Foundation where you can interact with their chat bot, A.L.I.C.E.  Just to let you know, the site makes use of an animated Flash avatar - so make sure you have Flash installed on your computer.

Comments

[travesti]

I liked Alice. It was fun.