technical problems with L-net?

I have long been concerned about technical problems with our chat software. Now and then I run a report showing, by week, how many chat requests we had and how many were joined by librarians.

The data looks something like this:

What I didn't know was why the chats aren't being picked up. I looked at week 8 (last week) and found of the 158 requests we missed:

137 patrons waited too long
  9 sessions are duplicates that no one picked up
  6 patrons disconnected before we got to them
  5 show librarians but not patrons for no apparant reason - why?
  1 shows a patron but no librarian - why?

So less than 1% had no connection between patron and librarian for unexplained reasons. It is possible these are technical problems - the server thinks the patron is there, but they are not. There still could have been other technical problems along the way, but I am pleased that our software works so well at getting people connected.

But the 137 patrons waiting too long is still a concern. Many of them waited over 10 minutes before being automatically disconnected. I dug a little deeper and found that 92 of the chats went to L-net and 45 of them to L-net local. L-net local makes up about 20% of the total traffic, but was responsible for almost one third of patrons timing out last week.

If L-net patrons are waiting too long, we are understaffed, but if L-net local patrons are waiting too long, something else is going wrong - L-net local is not usually subject to the same group visit pressures as L-net. I'll send out a reminder to L-net local libraries - the main point is to remember to log out before you go home.