When staffing your queues on a mobile device, you'll definitely want to use a 3rd party Jabber/XMPP IM client rather than the webchat client. One drawback of the webchat client on iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) is that the sound notification will not work. But the primary reason to prefer IM clients over webchat on mobile devices is push notifications. Push notifications will ensure that you easily know when there is an incoming chat from a patron, even if your device is locked or you are using another app. For instance, if you are helping someone with research during a chat, you will probably need to switch to a web browser, and with push notifications, you'll get proactively notified when your patron sends you a new message.
There are tons of IM client options out there - IM+, BeeJive, and Process One to name a few. In this post, we'll focus on IM+. There are two primary reasons why we tend to recommend IM+. The first reason is that it has both free and paid versions. The free version has ads and times you out after 2 hours. The pro version has no ads and lets you stay logged in for up to 7 days. The nice thing about having free and paid versions is that you can try out the free version now and later upgrade to the pro if you want to. The second reason is that IM+ is available over a variety of mobile platforms.
Configuring IM+, BeeJive, etc... to chat your LibraryH3lp (or My Customer Cloud) queues:
service = Jabber
login = your_username@libraryh3lp.
password is your LibraryH3lp password
host = libraryh3lp.com
port = 5222
use old-style SSL = off
For My Customer Cloud users, you'll just replace libraryh3lp everywhere above with mycustomercloud.
Here is a link to our documentation on this topic.
As far as IM+ settings go, you'll want to make sure that you have push notifications turned on. That way you'll be notified of incoming chats from patrons. Play around a bit. IM+ has various settings you can customize for push notifications, including sounds, alerts, and badges.
If you have experience with another mobile IM client that you'd like to recommend, please add a comment to this post and share your thoughts with other LibraryH3lp users. :-) im client , im+ , mobile staffing
2 comments:
I really like IMO.IM for h3lp chat. No configuration is necessary, I just log in as I would to the web client and it is good to go. It has tabs for different chats and sound notification for new chats and additions to conversations. I use it on the iPad AND on my Andriod phone, because my iPad does not have 3G. And it is free! I have not tried the video chat feature at all as our patrons have not created a demand for that kind of reference interaction. There is also a "busy" and "away" and "invisible" status for managing IM avalanches.
I also use IMO.IM for bringing together my personal chat streams from Fb and GTalk, and it works well integrating multiple chat streams.
Ciara Healy
Duke University
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