Day 1 - Welcome Stephenbot: Implementing Chatbot at Maritime College

Springy_Will · 2023-07-24T20:58:07+00:00

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Session information: https://training.springshare.com/springycamp/2023/stephenbot

Despite having a small library and a small staff, Maritime College was interested in implementing LibAnswer's new Chatbot service. Using existing library branding, librarians created "Stephenbot," opting to use the service when librarians were offline in order to expand after-hours services. Stephenbot is now available to users via the library's catalog and through Brightspace. Come learn how this new feature is serving our students.

Checkout the Chatbot!

Have any questions for Lauren Bradley?

Post them here! 💬

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Comments

Springy_Meg

We encourage everyone to share a link to their own Chatbot! Here's a question that didn't get answered in the session:

Emery asks: Has anyone been annoyed by the bot or chat popping up?

anthonyturducken

thanks lauren!

here's the chatbot at Tulane's Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, ChatHowieT https://library.tulane.edu/about/chat

Groomej

how do you balance patron privacy with using live chat transcriptions?

Springy_Meg

Kimberly asks: What are the effects of popup blockers and cookie blockers to the service?

lbradlymaritime

Emery: If they have, they haven't reported it to us! But I think the floating box is pretty unobtrusive, and users have the option to minimize it.

Anthony: Love HowieT's avatar! So cute.

Groomej: We give users the option to chat anonymously, so if they have disclosed personal information, they have self-reported it. The transcripts are stored inside the LibAnswers system, so only library staff have access to them. Our privacy policies prevent the sharing of patron data outside of our department.

lbradlymaritime

Kimberly: That's a good question. I have pop-up blockers and cookie blockers on my own browsers at home and work, and haven't noticed an issue. It could depend on the widget type. The Springshare folks may have more insight into this.

bduggins

Thank you for this, Lauren! It made me interested and curious enough to start looking into trying chatbot!

Springy_Meg

@lbradlymaritime / Lauren, thanks so much for telling us all about Stephenbot! 😍

re: the popup blockers, this is a terrific question — and it occurs to me only now, that wow, no one ever writes into Support about this (whew! 😅). To the best of my knowledge, pop-up blockers do not affect how any of our widget types work.

Cookie blockers might have an impact, however, if you use autoload delay aka proactive chat, where after a designated amount of time of being on a page, the chat widget automatically slides out, asking the patron if they want to chat. If you click No Thanks, then a cookie is added to prevent it from sliding out again for 60 minutes. If that cookie can't be set, then the proactive chat will keep poking out. 😕

As for folks being annoyed by proactive chat, we get folks asking about this, too! For most institutions, you're balancing trying to be helpful (and promoting the fact that assistance is available) with not being intrusive and annoying. This goes for proactive live chat and for chatbot. Here are some tips / good things to know when using proactive chat:

Selecting "No Thanks" vs clicking somewhere on the page. When the chat slides out, if a patron clicks No Thanks on the widget, it activates that 60-minute "they don't want to see this popup" cookie. The widget will not pop out again until the cookie expires after 60 minutes. (Note that this time could be shortened depending on device settings, but it's generally an hour.)
If users instead click somewhere on the page, it hides the slide-out temporarily, but it's not the same as clicking No Thanks. The slide-out will reappear again if they go to another page that has the same widget, or if they return to the original page.
Widgets don't talk to each other. If you use multiple widgets across your site (rather than reusing the same one), and they all have proactive chat turned on, if a user selects No Thanks on one chat widget, they will still get the slide-out for the other one until that one is also "No Thanks'ed."

Given these factors, here's what you can do to reduce frustration with these widgets:

Tell customers (and staff!) to use the No Thanks option on the widget slide-outs rather than clicking somewhere on the screen.
Consider increasing the Autoload Delay time to give patrons more time to digest the content of a page and move on to another page, which will restart the X second delay before the chat prompt appears. The idea here is, you're not prompting them to chat until it's more likely that they're "stuck" (because they've been on the same page for, say, 30 or 60 seconds, instead of a mere 10 seconds).
When possible, consolidate your chat widgets. If you have a single widget embedded across multiple pages, users can select No Thanks once and not see it again for 60 minutes. Granted, you might have different widget styles and unique customizations designed for different areas of your site, so you'll want to take that into account.

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I hope this helps! Thanks again, Lauren! 😎

cgetaz

Lauren, thank you so much for this presentation! I'm also at a small library and we are exploring using a chatbot for similar reasons (when we're offline, connect people to our services more).

I have a question that's maybe more of a Springshare support query, but who knows! I would really like to have some of our library student works test the chatbot before it's live…and when librarians are working and thus staffing chat, without changing our live chat settings. Do you have any ideas about how to set that up?

Springy_Will

Hi @cgetaz you can actually run a preview mode of the chatbot before going live with it.

You could also always create a dummy Chat widget to use and assign the bot to that. :)

cgetaz

@Springy_Will, I've been running preview mode and wanted something more live (but also not live), and I think making a dummy chat widget will do the job! Thank you!