What to do with local account questions

I sometimes hear that local account or PIN questions are among the least favorite of our AskUsNow! providers. I agree! It's a rare scenario when a customer logs in and is picked up by one of their own librarians who would have access to their library account information.

Is there anything we can do?

Depending on the question, you may be able to help the customer right there in chat. If it's a catalog or account access problem, there may be useful information in the POLICY PAGES that would let you know of a default PIN or the way to navigate the self service in the catalog.

However, there are times when the library's system either isn't self service OR the question really just needs a local person with account access. Although you might not have access to a persons specific account information, you CAN make sure that the customer has provided an email address and you can let them know that we will forward their request on to their local library for answering. Other options include providing a phone number for the local library, in the case of a time-sensitive request.

What do we say about this?

On our about page and our welcome login screen (the screen customers see when using the regular chat interface until the librarian pushes that first URL) addresses this issue and states that the customer "may be chatting with a librarian who is not from your local library, or even from Maryland and therefore would not have access to your personal library card records."

This statement, while alerting customers that we might not have access to their specific records, does not preclude us from providing after-chat or email assistance. We have an extensive referral system with almost every county in the state and we're able to make sure that customers get the assistance they need.

While providing a phone number to a customer is another option, we want to make sure that we're "moving the question, not the customer." They've already made the effort to contact us about their issue, it's our job to make sure the answer, or path to the answer, gets to them, versus making the customer go to other places for the answer.

Will this change?

In the future it might but until the point at which all Maryland library catalogs have a robust self-help service systems or all Maryland librarians have access to all Maryland customer accounts, we will continue to have to refer, rather than answer on the spot, the local account questions.

I welcome any comments or criticism on this subject so please don’t hesitate to respond.