Monday, April 28, 2025

What (if any) impact have entry forms had on guest engagement?

Amy Shelton 3:43 PM

An interesting question popped up recently while corresponding with a customer about entry forms and we thought it'd be interesting to reach out to the LibraryH3lp community for comment. The question is this -- how has the addition of entry forms impacted your guest engagement? Are stats up, down, or unchanged?

To be clear, we know that most LibraryH3lp customers are not using entry forms at all. Entry forms are 100% optional in the 2nd generation chat skins. This question is focused on those folks who have opted to add entry forms to their chat skins.

Our question is one that has it's roots in a shake-up that happened almost 20 years ago. WAY back when we started LibraryH3lp in 2008, the library chat world underwent a huge shake-up because libraries started offering embedded chat boxes powered by Meebo. (Blast from the past, right?) For those of you not familiar with the chat scene of 2008, Meebo was the first popular chat box that totally lacked any kind of barrier to entry. Guests would just start typing to start a chat just as today's entry-form-less LibraryH3lp chat box works. Meebo was intended for personal use but libraries readily adopted it because the price was right (a.k.a. free). Now, the super interesting result from the switch was that many libraries who used entry forms prior to Meebo were having orders of magnitude upticks in their chat stats after migrating to Meebo.

As an example, UNC Chapel Hill started using Meebo (Pam was still a librarian there at that time), the library saw their chat stats immediately more than double nearly when they dropped their old, entry-form-based chat for a formless Meebo box. The librarians there found that patrons liked the anonymity and the way they could start a conversation easily, but yet could still provide personal details later on if needed for the actual question at hand. However UNC quickly realized that Meebo didn't work well when there was more than one person staffing, and so LibraryH3lp was born.

Now fast forward to today, it would be interesting to hear from y'all. If you have adopted entry forms for your LibraryH3lp chat box after having provided service without entry forms, have you crunched the numbers on your chat stats before and after adding the entry form? Let us know in the comments so folks can follow along. Or, if you'd rather not share publicly but open to sharing with us, email us at LibraryH3lp support instead.