Zero to Hero: Monitoring and Statistics

In this installment, we'll talk about how you can monitor everything and look at statistics. This is a great way to ensure quality, look for service trends, and obtain useful data to support decisions for growing your service. Ready? Then, let's get to it.

Step 1: Login to admin dashboard.

Even though we're heading to the dashboard know that the Chat History page we're about to look at is also available in the webclient for staffing. We think that being able to monitor chats is so important to your chat service that we've made it available in both the admin dashboard and the webclient.

Pro tip! LibraryH3lp supports permissions. Each user who logs in can only see chats on queues to which they are assigned as operators unless the user has special administrative privileges.

Step 2: Click the Chat History button in the left sidebar.

Deleting/Anonymizing/Downloading chat metadata and transcripts.

Step 3: Click the Chat Reports button in the left sidebar.

There are 5 different types of reports available: per hour, per month, per protocol, per queue, and per operator. For now, we'll just talk about per hour but we encourage you to play around with all the types to get a feel for all the information available at your fingertips.

By default, all the chats you've ever had on any queue that are at least 45 seconds in duration are shown. After a while though, that's a lot of chats. So there are controls along the left-hand side to help you home in. As you play with the controls, you'll see your report update in real-time.

Start/End Date. Using the Start Date and End Date controls, you can control the time period shown in the graph. You can opt to have neither, one, or both specified.

Include System Messages. If you have an IM account (like AIM) integrated as a gateway, sometimes you'll get system notifications messages from the IM network. Click this box if this might affect you and you don't want to include these as part of your report.

Include Not Answered. Ensures all chats are included in the report.

Minimum Chat Duration. By default, only chats that lasted at least 45 seconds are included in the report. You can set this to whatever you'd like.

Why 45 seconds? After experimentation, we found this to be the optimal threshold for something you'd consider to be a 'meaty' chat. You can shorten that if you wish. Something like 5 or 10 seconds will cull out what we call the kthxbai messages. That is, when a guest comes back after a short break with some variant of "Ok, thanks, bye."

Queue. Use the checkboxes to select queues to include. The top-most checkbox (un)selects all queues.

Play with the graph.

Oh yes! These are not just any graphs. These are interactive graphs.

• Hover your mouse over data points in the graph to see their numerical values.
• Hover over the items in the graph's legend to bold that item on the graph.
• Click on the items in the graph's legend to include/exclude that item from the graph.

Review the data used to make the graph.

Below the graph is a table showing the data that was used to make the graph.

Use the Download CSV button (bottom right-hand corner) to download the graph data to your machine.

Pro tip: The CSV file can be locally imported into any spreadsheet program where you can make more graphs, generate statistics, etc.