Too friggin’ cute to not share somewhere

 Awwwwwwww.

How Not to Provide Excellent Customer Service

I need to rant about this a little bit before I forget about it completely.  When you work in an industry that’s all about the customer, noticing how other places do customer service becomes magnified.  I find myself thinking – “ooo, that’s a neat idea for us to do”, or “bleh, that cashier was just awful”, or “wow, I can’t believe she just did that for me!” Most people do this anyway – but as a librarian and one who always desperately strives to make every person leave my library happily, the little things (and big things) that other people do become more amplified.  I find myself wondering how the baristas at Starbucks are soooooo sweet to me every single day – I wonder, am I *that* cool (prolly not) or is the Starbucks Customer Service Training really *that* badass (prolly so)?  There’s about 10 of them at this Starbucks that know my name, tell me my new haircut looks great, ask me how my trip to CiL was, recommend me getting the espresso chocolate brownie (nuked, by the way…it’s heavenly), practically have my drink waiting for me the instant I walk through the door, and sometimes give me drinks on the house.  In fact, I love them so much I haven’t been able to bring up the fact that I’ll be moving two towns away in two weeks and will only be able to come back to this Starbucks on rare (but special!) occasions. 

The last time we visited Foxwoods Casino was to see Peter Cetera (shut up) in concert, which was January 2007 I think, and the time prior to that, probably a couple of years before that.  Mohegan Sun, on the other hand, – everything is great there, and we visit it probably once every couple of months.  We always say we’ll never go back to Foxwoods, but we try to take a peek at least once every couple of years to see if it’s gotten any better.  And it hasn’t.  I spent last Sunday at Foxwoods and regretted being there as every moment passed, the exchange I witnessed while trying to redeem my Wampum Rewards was the clincher, and it sealed the deal for me that I’d swear I’d never return. 

I won’t bother getting into details about how the self-service kiosks for swiping your Wampum Cards make absolutely no sense.  Why do you give me buttons for coupons and tickets just so that when I click on them, you tell me there’s an error and in fact, I have zilcho?  Why can’t I just swipe the damn card and get my entry into your stupid sweepstakes (get a clue from Mohegan Sun – they got their act right) – and NOT have to enter my pin and then hit another button to actually enter it in?  I know I’m not going to win anyway but you could at least simplify the process so I can get disappointed more quickly (and thus, head to the freaking slot machines faster. Cha-ching!). 

I also won’t bother getting into (more) details about driving around on the joint.  Somehow I was driving along and looking for a different entrance and I wound up in a mysterious administrative area, I think.  I came to a four-way intersection with absolutely no signs.  I turn right and wind up heading towards a secure, gated area.  U-turn!  Back to the intersection.  No signs.  Fine.

But what really bothered me is what happened when I was leaving.  Sunday night; it’s 7:30ish. I am tired of Foxwoods and I want to leave.  The ambiance of the place has sucked the life out of me and the slot machines have sucked the cash out of me.  But before I go, I want to redeem all the $$ I’ve accumulated on my not-so-ubar Wampum Rewards card.  So as I’m walking out, I check my balance – it gives me two numbers, one is some point accumulation crap which I don’t get (it’s like 13), and the other is $4 cash rewards.  So I figure I have $4 to spend, and I head over to the little Pequot Trader convenience store.  I get a $2 bottle of water, and I can’t decide between Altoids mints or the king size Snickers, so I get both, knowing full well I’ll go over the $4.  I stand in line.  There are two groups of folk in front of me.  All of a sudden this commotion ensues.  There are 4 asians at the front of the counter arguing over the 4 cigarette cartons; I assume they are trying to decide what to purchase because the woman behind the counter is screaming “I HAVE A LINE! You need to make your decisions NOW!” They continue arguing.  What’s the woman do?  She – I kid you not – snatches the ciggy boxes out of their hands, storms over to the other counter, slams them down on that counter, and says – sadly I must paraphrase but I’m sure I’m pretty damn close to what she says - Here! You decide over HERE what you are going to do, I have a line here and I can’t be waiting for you all day! She then tells the other clerk behind her to stand there and watch them while they decide.

Why?  Whyfor did you need to be a massive bitch like that?  Do you just assume – or do you hope - they’ll probably never come back and you can get away with treating people who probably just dumped a buttload of money into your casino like crap?  The woman in front of me turned around to me, totally wide-eyed, and said “I have no idea what just happened there but that was really rude.”  The clerk (in fact I think she’s a manager) gets the line going again, all the while having an argument with the four folks over on the other side telling them they can’t use their coupons together.  The whole fracas of this situation continues for another 5 minutes or so.   The woman did slightly redeem herself by not being a total brat when they finally decided what to do – and even made an adjustment to how she rang up the purchases so that they could use all four of their coupons (why the hell didn’t you just do that in the first place and avoid the whole gd 20 minute situation that made you look like a complete ass?) 

Part of me wanted to drop the stuff and leave, but the other part of me wanted to make sure I got my whole $4 that I so rightly earned on the stupid card, so I sucked it up and stood in line a bit longer.  And when I finally got to pay, it turned out to be $7.35, and I had my $3.35 in cash extra ready to go, but the other clerk hands me the card back and says I’m all set.  So what the hell just happened there?  I had more than $4 on the card but nowhere did it tell me that.  Was it the points then?  If so, what the hell is the “cash rewards” then?  And, why didn’t you ask me for my pin number when I went to make that purchase?  Your stupid machines gave me all this grief at the self-service kiosks to just look at the balance, and even on the slot machines themselves you force me to put in my pin number just to see my balance, and yet, I didn’t need a freaking pin number to make a purchase?  You must have a clue as to the number of cards that get left lying around the entire casino – so it would be okay for me to just run around and collect all of those and make a purchase?  I don’t care if it’s just a twenty cent purchase – that’s just asking for trouble.

Now I’m on the Foxwoods site.  I’ve got three numbers: one is my total points balance which is 10.74 points.  Then it tells me the points that are available for cash rewards: 9.00.  Then it tells me my cash rewards balance is $4.50.  I don’t get it. At all.  Maybe I’m too lazy to figure it out.  But I shouldn’t *have* to figure it out, should I?  Maybe if Foxwoods was the only joint in town, I’d make more of an effort to care.  But since Mohegan Sun is around, and everything they do makes so much more sense, I don’t care for Foxwoods’ style.  I’ve been spoiled by Mohegan Sun and its simplicity and friendliness and cleanliness and up-to-date-ness and great customer service.

Icky.

Do not want!  The brown is just so dull…and…why does she have two tails? 

On the bright side, I think I took a pretty nice picture!

This sign brought tears to my eyes

Ohhhh yes.  Right down the street from me.  I love you Nine West!

CiL 2008 – What’s hot in RSS

Steven M. Cohen – Law Library Management, Incorporated
http://stevenmcohen.pbwiki.com/CIL2008

Google Reader – starting to become the most popular.  Gives numbers on how many subscribers there are for a feed.  Not totally accurate but…gives some numbers.  Has incorporated search – so you can search in your google reader in your saved items. 

He’s used to being interrupted. He’s married. 

Shared items – when you share your items, they become added to a list in which you can share (much like librarything, delicious, etc. 

StevenMCohen.com – Life Feed via Tumblr.com!

Time for more hotness.  Google buys Feedburner.  IE, Vista, Firefox, have all incorporated feeds.  LibWorm Beta – 1500 feeds from the library science community – created a database out of it.  Now, do a search there and get automatic notifications of what you want.

We shouldn’t be going out to get information – we should be making information come to US.

Page2rss – let’s you do rss feeds on any page that doesn’t even have an rss feed.  Only gets updated once a day though, so if it changes often throughout the day, you won’t necessarily get all the newest changes that day.

YouTube rss – http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/rem.rss – change rem to whatever you want an rss feed for.

Aiderss.com – analyzes, ranks, ranks feeds.

Tweetscan.com – stay on top of tweets!

Friendfeed – find out what everyone’s been doing all day. 

PDF Escape – http://www.pdfescape.com - edit pdfs!

PDF me Not – http://www.pdfmenot.com - takes pdfs and lets you view it in a regular page!

Er….and maybe a bunch of other stuff!  Got distracted by Tweeting friends!

CiL2008 – Google

Greg Notess – SearchEngineShowdown.com

Google Database Spread: integration: images, news, video, etc.   Most users don’t bother clicking on anything up top (web, images, maps, etc).  So it tries to change the algorithm to help users find what they really want.

Database changes to Google:

Dec 2006 – web, images, video, news, maps, blogs, books, froogle, “even more”
Nov 2007 – added blogger, documents (but blogger took us right to blogger and not search)
April 2008 – shifted names around, brings the more popular, more important ones up like video, groups, scholar. – will always shift things around in the best interests of the user and/or sponsor

Remember that Google can be customized – you can change filtered search, the number of items that are displayed, etc.  so if you say “go to google and search for xxx” you two would not ever necessarily get the same results. 

More google changes: google ui tests, moving content blocks, added related searches, scrolling ads, removed rss & atom feeds from web. expanded sub-site links.  Fresher results (thought that doesn’t necessarily work), date search limits, added more file types like Google Earth, Flash, Autodesk. 

Advanced search has been streamlined and works much more smoothly and makes more sense to people.  Not so complicated.  Can add licensing, languages, etc. 

Google Book Search: added worldcat records. added links to implement into your own website.

Google News: duplicate stories removed, new sort options, video news, hosted ap news, advanced source suggestions as you type

Google Reader Searches: subscribed feeds (about 500 posts) – lets you search through all the ones that you’ve fed, and the ones you’ve already read as well.

Google Scholar: added elsevier titles, most frequent authors list.

Zero Phrase Search: Google change – they’re working on changing results – sometimes it will say No results found and will just search for the phrase without quotes - sometimes it won’t tell you no results found.  Many other sites will give suggestions, tell you what else to search for, or just say not found.

Yahoo! directory categories gone from results. support of semantic formats. stopped numbering results. added “more from this site”. Search assist.  Images - includes Flickr!

Ask.com – good to get overview, extra privacy sessions.

Exalead – allows truncation, proximity, but has not expanded too much yet and database a wee bit outdated – still has great options to narrow down and limit results.

Gigablast – new launch, freshness dating.

Cil2008 – Learning From Gaming

Presented by Chad Boeninger, Ohio University Libraries

Libraries:
What do we do now? borrow ideas from facebook, myspace, youtube, amazon, ebay.
Provide services with blogs, wikis, im, video, podcasts, SL, more.

We need to understand games – what makes them so engaging, why do we play them? how do games change players’ views of their environment.

April 29 – Grand Theft Auto IV comes out!

Giles Whittel: Video games, I’ll never buy one.

Video gamers can perceive reality much more differently than non gamers do.

From Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You: “what you never hear about mainstream coverage of video games is that it’s hard!  How much time do you spend and you don’t have fun – you may be confused, disoriented, you may be stuck?  If this mindless escapism, it’s a strangely masochistic version.  Who wants to escape to a place where you are frustrated 90% of the time?”

What’s our Job as librarians?
Figure out: Who plays games, what are they playing? what can we learn? how can we apply gaming concepts to library services and functions.

Who plays games: more male – 62%.  Age of gamers – 18-49 (large pie slice!)

Average gamer: 33 years old, has been playing for 12 years.  Women over the age of 18 represent 30% whereas younger males under 18 are only 23%.

Lego Star Wars Video!  Princess Leia and Chewbacca – Encourages exploration and to test things out – touching switches opens doors or drops cash! – rescuing Han Solo. Lego Star Wars – using the movie – a concept that we already know to apply and to defeat rancors – you know 3PO and R2D2 can control machines.  Use that knowledge to accomplish the missions. 

Ohhh God of War looks like fun.

Games are immersive environments, encourage learning while doing. 

Libraries have always been places to explore information – how can we encourage more exploration in libraries?  We need new nonmenclature: information literacy, reference, catalog, periodicals, reserves, databases, stacks, bibliographic instruction.  We need consistent interfaces across libraries!

What do we expect from our users? Users are accustomed to exploration, exploration in games yields feedback – positive or negative – gamers learn through tiral and error.  What does exploration in libraries yield?  We need to expect that they have “tried and died” so they come to us on the ref desk.

Immersion in libraries: How do we create environments that attract, engage, and retain our users?  The library as immersive space: Learning/Information Commons – make it more inviting to users.  Add a cafe.  Lots of technology.  Movable furniture encoruages customization of the workspace.  Does your library have wireless?  Do we offer laptops for use?  Wireless connectivity allows users to go to the spaces they prefer.

Customizable interfaces – make it your own.  My EbscoHost, MyYahoo, Facebook, My Library.  Customizable search interfaces.  Allow users control of their virtual library environments.

Learning While Doing: Practice Makes perfect.  Games encourage mastery – multiple difficulties w/unlockable content – how can we take advantage of this in libraries?  Library Instruction: Must incorporate hands-on experiences.  immediate application of content.  Relevant and timely – no more generic orientations.  Try experimenting with different methods for different subjects and classes.

Flickr – displays tagging in use – helps them to understand (sorta) library subject headings.  We need smarter systems in catalogs.  In the absence of smarter systems, we need point-of-need help – screencasts, like in games – they often have quick tutorials on how to accomplish something you’re on.

People want interactivity – not just be spoken to.  People want instant help.  Libraries’ best options for Instant help: embed chat and widgets all over the place on your site!  Email just isn’t good enough – it’s not quick enough, and maybe you’ll get an answer back some day….maybe you won’t.  Must also provide ways to help them to help themselves!

Leveraging games in libraries – why haven’t we talked about designing video games for libraries?  Do we have time and money? is a game scalable to what we try to teach? would they really want to play? what would this game look like?

Second LIfe – low initial investment, easy to start.  But do your patrons even care about virtual worlds? – In his survey – not really.

Librarians make great gamers:

1. We enjoy great fetch quests!  What? You want this? Here’s 37 ways to retrieve this article!

2. When we level up, we face another boss!  Vendors, new ways of getting what you need with new versions.

3. We like trial and error approaches to solving problems! 

Suggested Readings: The kids are alright by John Beck.

What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy by James Gee.

Everything bad is good for you by Steven Johnson.

“Don’t bother me mom, I’m learning!” by Marc Prensky.

Fast and Easy Site Tune-Ups

With Jeff Wisniewski: Web Services Librarian, University of Pittsburgh

Slides available at conference website about a week at the end of the conference.

I think I missed a few because I came in late…

• Add photos to contacts – it’s quick, easy, adds a personal element.
• Change boring old contact info into exciting hCards at http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator
• Replace every instance of “Click here” with something like “blah blah is available here”
• Firefox extensions: Tails and Operator(?)
• Help your server – if you use directory links add a “/” at the end of your links.
• Web 2.0 Stylr for creating nifty logos and text images
• Be an icon icon!  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear for tons of free icons
• Firebug + YSlow
• Cache – get as much content into caches as possible.
• For server admins: Server config files: set certain file types to stay fresh and not expire:  Image file types, css, js files, pdfs.
• Yahoo! High Performance research shows that combining small images into an image map: combining multiple smaller images into a single image speeds downloads due to fewer http requests.
• Eliminate inline scripts.  Calling scripts from external files will speed page download time. – Except for your homepage: inline scripts for your homepage – making http requests is much more expensive than the size of the data coming down.
• Spring cleaning: tidy your homepage: http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_uri+with_options
• Does your CSS overfloweth?  Use CleanCSS!
• Move important information out of the “blindness” zone – important information should be mid-center. 
• Google webmaster tools – page titles – site link > Diagnostics > content analysis > title tag analysis – tells you pages w/duplicate titles, non-informative titles, titles that are too long, etc.
• Global find and replace: Rewrite page titles with the following format: Document title | Section Name | Library Site name (i.e. Interlibrary Loan Policies | Library Services | Danbury Library)
• Forms: Add labels to your forms: 1) Accessibility: read by screen readers and 2) user friendly: check box text and not just text box is clickable
• Use radio buttons and check boxes appropriately (one option only or multiple options allowed?)
• Add social bookmark links: http://ww.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks/

Looks like I’ll be putting a couple of these things to good use.  I wonder if I can get the staff to have their pictures taken.

 

Computers in Libraries 2008!

Whee!  Tomorrow I’ll be headed down to Virginia for this very cool conference.  First though, I’m making a pit stop down in Virginia Beach.  I’m taking my cousin with me, and we’re meeting up with her sister + family who are driving up from Florida to meet on the beach Friday night for a mini-fam reunion.  Sometime Saturday I’ll head back up north to Arlington for the event.

It’ll be my first time at a CiL Conference, and from what I’ve read, it looks like I’ll be learning so much and having too much fun at the same time.  My usual dilemma of these conferences is that I see the track listings and schedules and I always want to go to 4 presentations at the same time.  Far too much good stuff.  I’ll be attempting to keep a level head though, and stay focused on the Web Design track…though I just may need to sneak over into the Gaming track of course.

So far, my tentative schedule: 

Sunday:  

• 9:00 am – 4:30 pm: Web Managers Academy Pre-Conference Workshop.
• 5ish: Sunday Evening Gaming Session

Monday:

• 10:30 am: Hi Tech & Hi Touch (How can I pass up a session with Jenny Levine?)
• 11:30 am: Library Web Presence
• 1:30 pm: Torn between What’s New With Federated Search and The Global Librarian
• 3:15 pm: Widgets, Tools, & Doodads for Library Webmasters
• 4:15 pm: Torn between Library Staff Training and Industry Learnings & Libraries

Tuesday:

• 10:30 am: Innovation Starts with “I”
• 11:30 am: Drat! Drupal & Libraries or Libraries A-Twitter?!
• 1:30 pm: From Woepac to Wowpac (Hooray!  With Kate and John!)
• 2:30 pm: Harnessing New Data Visualization Tools or Leading Technology in Libraries?
• 4:00 pm: Video, YouTube & Libraries; 2.0 Pecha Kucha, or IM Service??!

Wednesday:

• 10:30 am: Learning from Video Games (whee!)
• 11:30 am: Open Source Applications or Gaming & Learning
• 1:45 pm: Google Tracking or Open Source Library Automation
• 2:45 pm: What’s Hot in RSS & Social Software
• 3:45 pm: Searching for Social Web

And then I drive home!  Hope to see you there!

ProfessionsBook Mod – Well worth it!

• Can’t remember if your tailor can make resolute capes or not?
• Ever wonder how many primal fires you still need to farm to make that blasted weapon on your other alt?
• Ever go to the AH with your level 1 banker and wonder if your level 42 tailor has that pattern already or if your level 70 enchanter has that formula already?

Then you’ll definitely want to download ProfessionsBook! 

I had logged in early Monday morning to get my fishing and cooking quests out of the way (I still have to write about it – I haven’t done so like I promised because I’m kind of disappointed at the fact I only get one chance a day for a baby croc, but that’s another story for another day), and a guildie asked if I knew of any mods that would tell him what his other alts could make.  I said I didn’t know of one, but I promised I’d look into it.  And boy, am I ever glad I did!  If you have more than one alt, you definitely will want to download this mod.

After you’ve downloaded it, you just need to log on each of your characters and open up all the profession windows (cooking, tailoring, blacksmithing, whatever) – and it’ll store it in memory. Once you’ve done it for all your alts, you can search through everything you know how to do on all your alts.  You can then link the pattern as you normally would, or you can have it automatically list what the item’s ingredients are.

The best part of all is when you’re visiting the AH or you’re at a vendor – this mod will let you know whether or not your alts know it and if they can learn it, if they have that profession. For example, Miriella was over in Allerian Stronghold this morning, and when I scrolled over the recipes for warp burger and blackened basilisk, it noted that Springroll was capable of learning it and that Nutella was at Cooking 27 and was too low to learn it. Simply amazing.

Quit wastin’ yer time logging into your 14 alts and enjoy!