Live Chat at Scotch College
In Term 3 of 2017, Scotch College introduced live chat. This feature allows the school community to directly interact with the 1Degree team across the College (if you need details on the role of 1Degree, please click here). There were three main reasons as to why this was introduced and these are outlined below.
Firstly, students leaving class results in missed content. Often students leave class for a reason that is only partially related to an actual issue they are experiencing at the time. In addition to this, students can often be out of class for a significant percentage of the period due to the nature and diagnosis of the problem they are facing. To combat this, students and teachers were encouraged to use the live chat option as a means of reducing the disruption of learning during the lesson.
Secondly, teachers were able to request instant help to a classroom instead of having to phone or email the Tech Centre to create a service desk ticket. This meant that support from 1Degree could be more responsive and the notion of ‘just-in-time’ could actually be achieved within reason.
Thirdly, 1Degree were able to better integrate the use of the FAQ knowledge base into the teachers’ and students’ daily lives. By hosting the chat from this site, it was possible to directly link the relevant FAQ answers to the person in need of support, familiarising them with the online FAQ knowledge base.
What Do We Use?
At Scotch College, the 1Degree team manage live chat through an existing service called LibAnswers. This service has a live chat option where 1Degree staff login and are effectively put into a monitor’s queue to assist anyone using the live chat function. This queue can be split between different areas of the College, if required, and in our situation it allows us to split the service between Scotch College and our sister school.
What is the Staff Workflow?
Scotch College has two separate 1Degree support desks that service the Senior School and the Junior/Middle School. In general, the Senior School desk is not as busy as the Junior/Middle School one, therefore, the workflow is built around the Senior School monitoring the queues and answering the questions. From the moment they arrive at 8:00am, 1Degree staff log into the online chat system. Throughout the school day, the Senior School 1Degree staff member helps those that walk up to the physical desk whilst also monitoring the chat system. The live chat has an audio alert feature which alerts the staff member when a new chat has arrived, allowing them to respond immediately. In general, a small quantity of questions are currently being asked over live chat, but this number is expected to grow over the coming year. If a question is outside the scope of the 1Degree staff member, the case can be passed between any other user logged into live chat. As we operate two physical desks, the 1Degree staff can also have a chat session between themselves in the back end. Finally, the session ends at 4:00pm and no monitoring is conducted outside of this time. If patrons do click to start a session they can leave a message that generates a ticket to be answered the next day.
What Problems Have We Encountered?
With online chat, there is the expectation that you can produce the same level of support as if the person was standing in front of you. Consequently, it is expected that conversations are acknowledged within a minute of the alert, and that support should take no more than 10 to 15 minutes. Exchanges that take more than this amount of time should be something that is handled in person, similar to that of email protocols. During the conversation, we have canned responses that are used to speed up the response and training of staff answering the live chat. Finally, most answers should be in the ask.PLCSCOTCH knowledge base and people will be led to this service if a question has been answered before.
How Much Administration Does it Take?
In general, the system took little to no time to set up, however, we did have to make sure we had the right people answering the right questions. In addition, all transcripts are logged, so reviewing these is a fortnightly task to make sure that the quality of service is maintained.
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