customer service

Helpdesk Ticket Tracking Software – what are your options?

by David Lee King on February 14, 2013

IT helpdesk ticket tracking software – my library uses it. Right now, we use Track-It by BMC. But it’s clunky, hard to use, and isn’t quite meeting our needs anymore. So it’s time to start exploring our options!

Guess what? There are a TON of options out there. But first, what would we want in an IT helpdesk software package? Here are some features you should think about:

  • incident management – basic “track that IT problem” function
  • Searchable knowledgebase – document the fixes and answers … and create a powerful database of “what to do when”
  • Reporting – for managers like me. You need to keep track of # of tickets, # of closed tickets, # of still-open tickets, who worked on the problem, who had the problem (for potential follow-up with training if needed), etc.
  • Windows software, server-based, or web/cloud based?
  • Other functions that might be useful, depending on your setup, include LDAP/Active Directory integration, asset and contract management, email integration, and scheduling.

These hosted services seem to be all the rage right now, and I have to admit – they look pretty good (at least, compared to what we currently have in place):

I also recently asked for recommendations, and what other organizations are currently using, via Twitter and Facebook. Here’s what some of you mentioned:

So there’s a good list to get you started. Anyone have experience with any of these? Like or dislike them? Sound off in the comments!

pic by michaeljzealot

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Interesting to Us or to our Customers?

by David Lee King on January 22, 2013

I was just reading a blog post on Seth Godin’s blog about stuff being interesting. His main point – is it interesting because it happened, or is it interesting because it happened to you?

That made me think – what stuff do libraries do “for our customers” that we find interesting or useful or amazing … but our customers – not so much?

Think about some of these things libraries have, for example:

  • Library Catalog – interesting to our customers?
  • Article Databases – interesting to our customers?
  • Periodicals reading room …
  • Reference desk …
  • Dewey Decimal System …
  • etc

I don’t have a big problem with anything listed above. But still – libraries pour a LOT of time, money, and expertise into each of these fairly traditional things libraries have and do. Do our customers really … REALLY … find them all that interesting?

Asked another way – is your periodicals reading room standing-room only? Is it hard to find a public computer because so many customers are using the catalog? Get the idea?

I think our goal should be two-fold:

  1. spend time, money, and expertise on stuff our customers care about
  2. do stuff that our customers care about

Not always easy to do, huh?

photo by abeckstrom

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Make your Stuff Obvious

by David Lee King on January 10, 2013

This sign was at our local shopping mall. Like any good blogging geek, I stopped and took a picture of it – to the chagrin of my kids, I’m sure (“Mom – Dad’s taking pictures of signs again!” – eye roll!)

But the sign made me think of a few things that I thought I’d share:

  1. The sign is nicely done – large, easy-to-read words.
  2. Just an interesting side-note – the sign’s in the shape of a smartphone. A few very short years ago, a phone that did wifi wouldn’t have made any sense. But we all easily get it now, don’t we?
  3. The message is clear, the service is obvious, the sign is hard to miss. You know exactly what they’re advertising.

Contrast that with the average wifi sign in a library. In most of our libraries, we make little, tiny, dinky-winky signs that say “wifi.” Usually provided to us by our wifi vendor. If we have signs at all [hmm... I wonder what our wifi signs look like? I’ll need to check].

But at the mall … where they really want you to stay awhile … the wifi sign is HUGE. This sign was almost as tall as me, folks! And right out in the walkway, standing close to the food courts (one place people would possibly use wifi for an extended period of time).

What do they want you to do at the mall? Stay awhile. Eat some food. Use their free wifi. And buy more stuff!

Now translate that to a library. What do we want our customers to do? Stay awhile? Eat more food (if you have a cafe)? Read/watch/listen to/download more content? Ask us questions? Attend our events? Probably all of those things (though I’ll bet most of us don’t spell those goals out quite like that).

Define what it is you want your customers to do, then make your branding, your promotion, your signage – what you want people to do while engaging with you – make it obvious.

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Five Tips to Reshape your Social Media Plan in 2013

by David Lee King on January 8, 2013


[This is an article I wrote for my book, Face2Face - I thought it would make a great post here, too - enjoy! DLK]

Social media has been around for over ten years. My guess is that by now, your organization is probably involved in some way with social media. Maybe you have created a Twitter or Facebook account. Maybe you even have some friends and fans on those accounts, and you share things with them when you have time.

Let’s rework this in 2013. Social media is now mainstream, and your customers are using it to connect. They connect easily to each other, and since the tool is the same, they’ll find it easy to connect to your organization, too… if you make a few easy-to-do adjustments in your approach to business-facing social media.

Here are five simple adjustments you can make to kick-start your organization’s social media efforts in 2013:

1. Focus on Conversations

First off, let’s focus on conversations. Many organizations and businesses have been using social media status updates as a broadcasting tool. They send out notices of events, sales, or coupons. Possibly, they have used social media as an easy outlet to send out press releases and important corporate announcements.

My new book - Face2Face: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media Tools to Create Great Customer ConnectionsGuess what? If your organization focuses primarily on sending out corporate communications, your customers will tune out your organization and unfriend you in a heartbeat. In 2013, instead of using social media as a one-way broadcast tool, work on starting and continuing conversations with your customers.

This will require your organization to do three important things: 1. Listen before you speak. Set up some listening tools (Google alerts and Twitter search alerts are good places to start) to see what your customers are saying about you; 2. Respond, using colloquial, conversational language. This will feel weird if you’re used to more formal marketing-speak. Make it feel like you’re talking to a work colleague at the water cooler – do this, and people will start talking to you. And 3 – figure out what types of conversations YOU want to start. Do some brainstorming on the conversations your organization needs to hear in 2013, and start those conversations.

2. Focus on the Visual

For the most part, many businesses and organizations have been posting text-heavy status updates in their social media accounts. That makes sense in text-based Twitter, but not so much in Facebook. In fact, Facebook best practices show that when you do one simple thing – add a photo or a video to your post – engagement increases by 100% or more.

So get those cameras out of your pockets (yes, that iPhone or Android smartphone makes a great point-and-shoot camera), and start taking photos around the office, the warehouse, or the store. Maybe think about the three most important things that your customers should know about your organization, take photos of that, then share those photos with customers.

3. Focus on Video

That smartphone I just mentioned in #2 is also HD quality video recorder, and we can put it to good use! There’s a reason YouTube is so popular right now – people love watching short videos. Studies show that people engage more with video posts than with text-only posts.

Here’s my guess – most likely, you haven’t made many videos for your organization. If you have created some videos, it probably resembled a TV commercial. That’s not what your customers want to watch. Instead, get to the point immediately – YouTube suggests that the first 15 seconds are critical to connect with viewers. So don’t waste those seconds with titles, fade-ins, and credits.

Just start sharing your main points. Then post that video to two places – YouTube and Facebook. Use YouTube to share in most places, and use the Facebook upload to share with your Facebook page fans. Facebook’s algorithm favors videos uploaded to Facebook, so those will get seen more than a shared YouTube video.

4. Focus on Next Steps

Many times organizations post information to their social media accounts, but don’t include anything for customers to do. They don’t include a next step. Let’s change that in 2013. Make sure that everything you do includes some type of “ask.” That ask can be as simple as asking customers to “friend or fan” a Facebook Page, or the ask might be to click a link that takes them to a new product or a buy-it-now page.

More people will click if you actually ask them to click. Because of this, make sure to provide customers with some next steps, and actually invite them to take that next step. Do that, and your organization will be one step closer to continued engagement with customers.

5. Focus on your Customers!

Finally, most businesses and organizations, believe it or not, don’t actually focus on their customers! Instead, they focus on their stuff, on their showroom floor, or on their sales staff. In 2013, let’s focus on our customers. Engage them in conversation. Ask them if they like what they’re seeing. Ask them to take next steps, and invite them into your organization.

Follow these five simple reshaping steps, and you will be well on your way to having a great 2013 with social media, and with some really engaged customers, too.

pic by Tintin44

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Tips for going on TV

by David Lee King on December 5, 2012

WIBW StudiosMy library is lucky – our local TV news station loves the library, and gives us a spot every Tuesday afternoon called “Library Tuesday.” The afternoon anchor does a quick 3-minute interview with someone from the library.

Once in a while, that someone is me. I’ve been able to talk about a website redesign, a new library catalog, and our Podcamp Topeka annual conference.

If you combine that with also being on regional TV news a couple of times for my new book Face2Face, I can honestly say I’ve been on TV more than the average librarian :-)

Between being prepped by the library’s marketing director, by reading a couple of articles, and just by doing it, I have picked up a few pointers along the way that I’d like to share with you.

So – here are some Tips for being interviewed on TV:

Looking good on TV:

  • Dress the part. Check out what the interviewer usually wears (by watching a clip online or by watching the day before your interview), and dress in a similar style. Stick to plain colors – no loud stripes or big shiny jewelry.
  • Look interested and attentive. So mind that posture! Sit up straight.
  • Smile.
  • Don’t be nervous. If you’re like me, I tend to think “how many people will be watching this?” Then it suddenly feels like I’m talking to thousands of people. Not a good thing to think about! Instead, look around you in the studio – my guess is that there are probably 2-5 people there, including you. If you think like that – that you’re only talking to a handful of people, you’ll probably feel much better!
  • Talk to the interviewer. They might direct you to just look at them. So do that, and simply have a good, quick conversation with that person (yes, with lights shining on you and a camera pointing at your head … just ignore that stuff).
  • Ask where to look. If no one tells you, feel free to ask the anchor or the camera operator where you should look. You will usually be looking at the interviewer. But if you want to look at a camera (which loosely translates to looking at the people watching on TV), there’s one main camera and 1-2 other cameras that get cut-away shots, etc.
  • It’s just a conversation. Don’t read a script on-air, don’t memorize something and then try to say it back. You will come out sounding pretty amateurish if you do that. Just talk about whatever it is you wanted to talk about with the interviewer. They’re professionals, and they can help steer the conversation where it needs to go (sometimes, not always).

 Getting your message across:

  • Stay on message. be brief. If the interviewer strays off-topic, feel free to steer that person back if you can.
  • Be succinct. Short, succinct answers are the best answers in interviews. It gives the editors something to edit down to if it’s a pre-recorded interview, and it helps get your points across clearly in a live setting. TV likes byte-sized bits of information, so the more you can do that, the more (potentially) you will be heard.
  • Be knowledgeable. At my library, our marketing person sends information out in advance to the news anchor that will be interviewing me. That way, he knows what we’ll be talking about. If that happens, make sure you get a copy of that information and that you can talk about that topic for three minutes. It’s helpful to have 1-3 key messages you want to get across, and to stay focused on that message during the interview.
  • Have a closing thought. More than once, I’ve been asked “is there anything else you want to say?” I generally have a main last point ready, just in case they ask.

Other important things to remember:

  • The camera and the microphone are always on. Just assume that, even if it’s not always true. So don’t do anything that would be embarrassing if it “accidentally” went live (cursing, picking your nose, etc.).
  • Don’t repeat the question! This isn’t a huge deal in a live studio setting, but when the interviewer is doing a pre-recorded thing, don’t repeat their questions, or back into your answer. Just answer the question succinctly. More than once, I’ve seen an editor “snip” the first part of someone’s quote out-of-context, and then that’s the “official” quote used as part of the story. So none of that “Hmm. I know it looks that way, but…” Instead, just jump into the thing you really need to say.
  • Mute that phone. Or even better, turn it off. Once, my phone was muted during a live TV interview … but it started buzzing in my pocket, and I had to turn it off on-air. Sorta embarrassing!

Now – go out there, get on the news, and share good stuff about your library!

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