report on last month's test of alternative software to QuestionPoint

Last month, 18 librarians helped us test an alternative to QuestionPoint's live chat service, Jive Software's OpenFire/Spark/FastPath suite.

Looking strictly at the price point for web chat software, FastPath blows QuestionPoint out of the water. But we knew that before we did the testing.

We wanted to know
- are there more technical problems?
- do patrons like it better?
- would it encourage more librarians to staff virtual reference?

Test results are ... drumroll ... inconclusive.

Technical problems? About the same in each system.

Wait times and session lengths? Shorter in FastPath, but hard to compare.

Patrons? Not enough told us what they thought. Most of them just love the library.

Librarians? They think Spark's IM interface is easier to learn, but other than that, we miss our resolution codes and policy pages.

I am trying to be neutral and to only report the results of our pilot and related surveys. I have some opinions about what we should do, but they're changeable, and I'm going to withhold them while I listen to what everyone else has to say.

Read the whole report, attached below.