We’ve given the LibraryH3lp Reports page within the admin dashboard a major upgrade!

The new Reports page makes it easier to explore your chat activity and visualize trends, and answer questions about how your service is being used. You’ll still find familiar reports like Chats per Hour, Chats per Month, and Chats per Queue, but now these also serve as starting points for richer, more flexible reporting.

Chats per Hour

Start with a report, then make it your own

The Reports page includes the familiar built-in reports for the chat module:

• Chats per hour
• Chats per month
• Chats per protocol
• Chats per queue
• Chats per operator
• Chats per profile

Choose one and you’ll get a chart and table of your data. From there, you can customize the report using Filters, Analysis, and Visualization settings.

Want to see chat counts by month and queue? Average wait time by operator? Activity by day of the week and hour?  Want to lump a bunch of queues into one for a simpler report?  The new Analysis controls let you choose what to measure, how to group the results, and which groups should appear as separate series on the chart.

More ways to visualize your data

Reports can now be displayed using bar, line, and pie charts, with the available visualization options depending on the report.

Charts are interactive, too. Hover over chart data to explore individual values, or use the legend to focus on the data you care about. Clicking a legend item hides that series from the chart; click it again to bring it back.

Charts and tables also work together. Hovering over data in one can highlight the corresponding data in the other, making it easier to connect individual values with the bigger picture.

Chats per Month: hover features

New measures and calculations

A more useful table view

We've kept the powerful table features from the old reports and added row and grand totals more consistently. As mentioned above, hovering over table data highlights the corresponding data in the chart above.

And like in the original reports, you can click column headings to sort the results. Click again to reverse the order, and a third time to return to the report's original ordering.

Chats per Month: table close-up, reverse sorted by protocol

Flexible report settings and an important default change

Report Settings

We've also changed one important default: answered chats of any duration are now included in reports.

Previously, the default reports filter only counted answered chats that lasted at least 45 seconds. There's no longer a default minimum duration. If a minimum duration makes sense for the question you're asking, you can still set one yourself.

Reports still filter out unanswered chats by default, but you can include them if desired.  Unanswered chats are those that never received a response from a chat operator.

Historical reporting also continues to include activity associated with users and queues that have since been deleted, so deleting something doesn't make its past activity disappear from your reports.

Download what you see—or get the raw data

You can download the chart as an image, and table downloads have gotten an upgrade as well.

If you want to take the nicely organized table into a spreadsheet, download the table data in CSV format. The data reflects the displayed table, including its organization, labels, zero values, and totals.

If you'd rather work with the underlying report results yourself, a raw data download is available too.

Explore!

The goal of the new Reports page is to provide a useful base set of reports that are similar to those provided in the prior version, while giving you room to explore further much more flexibly.

Start with one of the built-in reports, click Edit, and experiment with the Analysis options. Combining different measurements, groupings, and visualizations can reveal quite a bit about when your guests chat and how activity is distributed across your service.

We hope you'll have fun exploring your data with these new tools!

We're excited to introduce a powerful new feature in LibraryH3lp: Guest Forms. Guest Forms make it easy for guests to contact your organization, whether you're using Tickets, 3mail, or Chat.

One Form. Your workflow.

When a guest submits a form, LibraryH3lp automatically delivers it where it needs to go:

• Tickets → A new ticket is created with the submitted information.

• 3mail → An email is delivered to your shared mailbox containing the submitted information.

• Chat → If your chat queue has an external email address set, an email is delivered to that external email address containing the submitted information.

The same form experience works across all three.

Screenshot of the Form Builder for Guest Forms

Perfect for Offline Chat

One of our favorite uses for Guest Forms is pairing them with LibraryH3lp Chat.

When staff aren't available to chat, instead of telling guests that chat is offline and offering other ways to get in touch, you can present a Guest Form directly as your offline appearance. Guests can leave their question, provide their contact information, and continue with their day knowing someone will follow up.

It's a simple change that creates a smoother experience for the guest and helps to ensure that important questions don't get lost.

Whether you're using Tickets, 3mail, or an external organizational email address, Guest Form submissions make their way to the right destination seamlessly.

It's important to note that Guest Forms are all about guests contacting you outside the context of a chat. So if you are interested in Entry Forms for chat, where extra metadata is collected from guests just prior to the start of a chat, those can be configured separately in the Chat Skin Designer.

Built for the Real-World

Guest Forms include several important behind-the-scenes features.

• Spam protection helps reduce unwanted submissions.

• Support for custom fields lets each form collect the information that's most useful to your staff.

• Optional submission metadata, such as referrer and IP address, can be captured when appropriate to aid troubleshooting and abuse prevention.

• The same modern form experience works consistently regardless of whether submissions become tickets or email conversations.

We'd Love Your Feedback

We're excited to see how you use Guest Forms.

Whether you're managing help requests through Tickets, collecting messages with 3mail, or extending your Chat service beyond staffed hours, Guest Forms provide a flexible new way for guests to connect with your organization.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback and learn how you're putting this new feature to work.

We're excited to announce the release of Tickets, LibraryH3lp's new help desk module!

You already use Chat, 3mail, FAQs, and the Sharing Tool to connect with guests and provide great service. Tickets builds on these tools by helping you manage questions and requests that don't fit neatly into a live conversation.

Think of Tickets as your centralized place to track, organize, collaborate on, and resolve requests over time.

Why Tickets?

Chat is wonderful, but not every interaction happens in real time.  

Sometimes a guest submits a question after hours. Sometimes a request requires research, follow-up, or coordination between departments.  And sometimes you just need a better way to keep track of who is working on what.  

A shared email box might not be quite enough if the guest's request is complex or if you have a big team.

That's where Tickets comes in. With Tickets, you can:

• Track requests from start to finish

• Keep guests informed through email notifications

• Assign work to staff members

• Organize requests with statuses and tags

• Collaborate using staff-only notes

• Transfer requests between departments

Instead of managing these interactions through a shared mailbox, Tickets gives you a dedicated workspace designed for ongoing support.

Multiple Ways to Create Tickets

Tickets can be created through:

• Guest web forms

• Email

• Manual staff entry

Prefer structured intake forms? Use Guest Forms.

Want guests to simply send an email? Tickets can do that too.

Need to create a request on behalf of a guest? Create tickets directly from the Tickets interface. This is especially handy when the guest is on the phone or is in-person at a help desk.

Built for Teamwork

One of the biggest advantages of Tickets is collaboration.

Tickets can be assigned to staff members, reassigned when responsibilities change, and transferred between queues when another department is better suited to help.

Staff-only notes make it easy to share context internally without exposing those conversations to guests.

Whether your team consists of two people or multiple departments, Tickets helps keep everyone on the same page.

Familiar LibraryH3lp Concepts

If you're already using LibraryH3lp Chat, many parts of Tickets will feel familiar.

Like Chat queues, Tickets uses queues to organize expertise and route requests to the right people.

Need separate workflows for circulation, reference, technical services, archives, IT, or other departments? Create as many queues as you need. Tickets can be transferred between queues as needed.

Stay Informed

Tickets includes both email and visual notifications.

Staff can optionally receive emails when tickets are created, assigned, updated, or closed. Guests can receive emails throughout the lifecycle of a request, helping everyone stay informed without extra effort. Or you can set up email notifications to be more infrequent, only sent when specific events occur.

A Better Home for Complex Requests

Chat is great for immediate help. FAQs are great for self-service. Email helps teams communicate.

Tickets fills a different need.

It's designed for questions and requests that require tracking, follow-up, collaboration, or resolution over time.

Tickets won't replace every interaction. Chat remains the fastest way to provide immediate help, and FAQs remain a great self-service option for answers to standard questions. But when a request is more complex, Tickets gives your team a purpose-built way to manage it.

How Tickets Fits Into Your Subscription

The Tickets module is available in two ways:

• Tickets Solo — for organizations that only need ticket management.

• Core Plus One — for organizations that want to add Tickets to their existing LibraryH3lp Core subscription.

We've updated our pricing page so you can explore options and generate an instant estimate for your organization.

We're excited to see how libraries and other organizations use Tickets to streamline workflows, improve communication, and provide even better service.

The Tickets module is available now in LibraryH3lp. Curious? Check out our pricing page for details and an instant estimate, or email support and we'll be happy to set you up with a 30-day trial.

For quite a while now, we've offered proactive texting within 3mail. Now we're excited to announce that we're also offering the same feature directly within chat if you're using the webclient for staffing. 

If you have opted to include the SMS add-on with your subscription, operators can hover over the texting queue in the webclient for staffing to find the "SEND SMS" button.

Hover over your queue in the webclient for staffing

The "SEND SMS" button launches a window that asks for a phone number for the guest and a message. 

Add a phone number for your guest and a message to send

Finally, click "SEND" and you're all set. You'll see a chat with that guest appear. You can then close the chat window by clicking the X in the top, left corner or send additional messages if desired.

IMPORTANT for US customers: In order to comply with US regulations related to proactively initiating text messages to guests, you are required (if you haven't already) to email us information and supporting evidence which describes how guests will opt into receiving text messages from your organization. Typical SMS use that is already covered under your agreement with us is for responding to texts initiated by guests.

Don't have the add-on? Our text messaging add-on module is backed by Bandwidth and Twilio, two robust providers of SMS infrastructure for applications. With the add-on, you receive a standard 10-digit phone number or you can port an existing number into LibraryH3lp. Incoming text messages are handled like all other chats within the webclient interface and can be transferred, transcripts saved if desired, along with many other great features.

The add-on is available in the US and Canada. For countries outside the US and Canada, email us for availability. If texting sounds like something you might want to add to your subscription, let us know by email. We're happy to set you up with a no risk trial.

We've added a handy new indicator to each guests's chat window that lets you know at a glance how long a guest has been waiting. The indicator appears at the bottom of chats when an operator has yet to answer.

Guest wait time indicator

Webclient Preferences -> Chat Window Settings

At the beginning of the year, we blogged about how you can opt folks out of their staffing assignments in order to effectively remove them from chat should they forget to log out. And now we've made it even easier to force a webclient user to log out if they've forgotten to do so!

On the users management page of the admin dashboard (US, CA, EU, SG), local LibraryH3lp administrators can use the "Force Logout" button for a webclient user. That's it! Easy peasy.

One recommended follow-up after using "force logout" is meet with the user later and see if enabling the auto-logout feature in the webclient for staffing would be beneficial.

However if a user does not use the webclient for staffing and instead uses an external chat client like (like Pidgin, Adium, or a mobile app) then "force logout" will do no good because those chat clients have built-in reconnect logic which is difficult to overcome. In this case, the thing to do is go to the administrative dashboard and opt that user out of their staffing assignments on the users management page like we covered in that blog post earlier this year. That way, even though the user remains online, their availability does not affect the queue's overall availability for chat.