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Innovative Phone Alerts & SMS

Innovative Phone Alerts & SMS

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  1. When making a phone call for a hold pickup or overdue item, identify the patron you are calling for at the beginning of the message. This is needed for multi-patron households to know who the message is intended for.

    12 votes

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  2. For years, libraries I've worked with have wanted a telephone notification solution that allows us to create second overdue call that can include different, more escalatory messaging from the first. It would be great if Innovative Phone Alerts (IPA) would allow this for Sierra customers.

    For example, a first overdue call might be a gentle reminder. A second might mention the potential for contact by a collection agency. Many libraries have been moving away from fines to encourage materials recovery & the potential for nuance between a first overdue call & subsequent calls would be greatly appreciated.

    9 votes

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  3. We're about to go live on IPA after using i-tiva for the last several years (& Teleforms before that). We've got about 140K patrons who prefer receiving their library notices by phone over e-mail, so we're keen on keeping that playing field as level as possible.

    At the same time, we're hoping for as seamless a user experience as possible & also interested in making sure these users can, when needed, connect to a human being. As it stands, IPA does not currently have a menu option to connect to live help or an "operator."

    In either case, this would…

    7 votes

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  4. We have 140,000 patrons with a notice preference set to telephone, which currently means they receive notifications for holds & overdues. It would speak more to equity of service if they were able to receive courtesy notices for items that are either nearly due or have been renewed through Sierra's autorenewal process by phone, just as those whose notice preference is set to e-mail do.

    7 votes

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  5. Many libraries rely on call data to monitor system performance & troubleshoot as needed.

    This would be made far easier available reports could be automatically e-mailed to staff. For example, our current solution allows for report e-mails on the successful import of call data & the completion of calls for the day, along with detailed/summary daily & monthly reports, all of which we find quite useful for both system monitoring & statistics. Each of these reports can be sent to multiple e-mail addresses for review/action as needed.

    7 votes

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  6. When a customer claims to not be receiving calls for hold or overdue notices, one of the first steps in troubleshooting using our previous telephone notification system was to generate & queue a test call. We'd choose the call type (hold or overdue), enter the customer's number, & the system would generate & send out a call.

    We'd often be able to do this in real-time, when a customer is at a branch & staff can be there to confirm whether they got the call.

    We'd very much like to see this functionality added to IPA's dashboard.

    6 votes

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  7. Add support for non-English languages to IPA - specifically Spanish and French-Canadian, with others to follow

    6 votes

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  8. While testing IPA, it was determined that library patrons who have blocked cards receive a recording of "you've entered an invalid number," rather than directing them to contact the library. Because "an invalid number" could also mean the number was input incorrectly, it would be much less confusing to the patron if the recording for a number that was in the ILS but could not be accessed was customizable.

    6 votes

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  9. We're about to begin our second week of calls made through IPA.

    Our library values the importance of metrics for both analysis & troubleshooting & since moving from i-tiva to IPA, see the lack of daily reports as an unfortunate step backward. We liked knowing which days of the week had larger call volumes or if marketing or other efforts created a boost in usage, which is a lot harder to determine without daily reporting, or at the very least without a 'date' filter.

    6 votes

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  10. Currently, IPA does not make calls on a number of holidays in the USA & Canada (see attached for the USA dates, which includes standard holidays & others that are less so, like the day after Thanksgiving).

    This runs counter to our pre-IPA practice of allowing calls on all days except Christmas & Easter.

    It also runs counter to our sending of e-mail notices, which go out 365 days a year.

    We'd like the ability to exercise more local control over what days, if any, calls are not made.

    And as we learned yesterday (July 4th), the ability for patrons…

    5 votes

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  11. We'd like for IPA to offer the same types of notices that LX Starter does to allow for better equity for our phone patrons.

    5 votes

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  12. Having the option for libraries to toggle on/off a setting that would group all notice types for a patron into a single phone call per notice batch run would allow libraries to reduce the number of times the system calls a customer in a short period of time.

    For Example:
    Currently, if a customer has 2 items overdue, 3 items on the hold shelf and 1 hold that was canceled then they would get 3 separate phone calls.

    Libraries may prefer to have their patrons get all of this information at once if it is all available at the time…

    5 votes

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  13. A support scenario that I imagine is pretty typical among libraries is one where staff receive word that a customer is not receiving their telephone notices. Staff then checks the available reporting to review the call history for that customer.

    In IPA, currently, the reporting is grouped by result status. See image ipa1. So you have the Answered calls in one data set, the Failed calls in another, the Ignored, & Pending calls in yet another. Aside from knowing the total number (e.g. x calls failed because of y), this isn't user-friendly at all.

    When we receive word that a…

    5 votes

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  14. Currently, when a customer calls IPA, they can hear their total number of holds, & the title & position in the queue for each hold. We want them to be able to cancel a hold request if no longer interested in an item.

    Customers who manage their account by phone should have access to the same functionality on that platform as those who manage their account online.

    3 votes

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  15. If a patrons has the Innovative Mobile App with an associated account have the IPA alert go through the applications push notification rather than the SMS notification. I know this is asking for a lot, but it's something our team discussed as ideal method of delivery

    3 votes

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  16. We went live on IPA last week. At the moment, only two staff have the password, still unchanged from the default provided during implementation. This morning, we found that we've been locked out.

    While we're looking into having our access restored, the addition of a 'Forgot your password?' option to the login screen seems like a no-brainer.

    3 votes

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  17. Currently the conclusion string of the message (in our case "goodbye") is included in the string that is spoken before the "repeating" message. It would be ideal to only have this conclusion message spoken once, at the very end of the call before the system hangs up.

    2 votes

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  18. Customers would like to be able to remit charges due to the library by telephone.

    We have 125K+ patrons who have their notice preference set to telephone. A number of them also rely on IPA to manage their library transactions, whether its to review & renew borrowed or requested items.

    We would like to continue to enhance their experience & provide them with the same level of account management available to customers who manage their account online. In this case, we'd like to see IPA add functionality that would allow customers to pay any charges on their account via Innovative…

    2 votes

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  19. Due to limitations in the fields exposed to print templates, we have repurposed SIerra's TELEPHONE2 field for use as a non-telephonic field. It would be helpful if IPA would place calls only to the phone numbers defined in a tag list of patron fields defined by each library.

    Alternatively, expose more patron record fields to the print template interface. :D

    2 votes

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  20. We would like improved customization for the prompts/menu options heard when callers dial in to IPA. Our Library's preferred designation for patrons is "customers," & while that seems trivial, we'd like it to be consistent. We'd also like to be able to change things like "patron barcode" to "library card number."

    1 vote

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