Answers to Staff Questions - Public Services Software

Submitted by Leslie Marinelli

This is Part 4 of our answers to the You Ask, We Answer staff blog post. 

Just a reminder, we received a number of great questions, and some of them are more complex than others, so thank you for your patience as I gather answers for you. 

Two of the questions we received are related to software used by our public services staff. I reached out to IT and Facilities Manager Holly Barfield for responses.

Question: 

“In our version of Polaris, is it possible to put a 30 min to an hour delay on when patrons are notified of holds being ready? We have a lot of eager patrons who show up quickly after their notification and we spend a lot of time running to the back to get them before carts are full and ready to be shelved. It would lift some frustration for staff and also patrons who don't see their items on the shelf.”

According to Holly, email and text notifications are automatically generated as soon as the hold is triggered. This setting is hard-coded into Polaris and cannot be altered on our end. Hold notices for phone notification are sent at 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 5:00 p.m. and we do have some control over that schedule, but the bulk of our patrons use email and text for their notifications so changing phone notification times would not make much difference. Printed mailers are not sent until the next day.

The other software-related question we received was:

“Would it be possible to limit the amount of time someone can make a curbside appointment before their actual appointment time? Recently several patrons have made appointments 10 minutes before their scheduled time, which does not allow us enough time to check the scheduler and prepare their bags, especially since we are understaffed and are not able to constantly check the curbside scheduler.”

For branches that heavily rely on the CMT scheduler to prep curbside bags in advance, this is a great idea! I personally have had to prep curbside orders of 30 or more items with very little notice and it is indeed stressful. I totally agree—it would be ideal if we could maximize the amount of warning we get to prepare those orders, especially at the two branches that have higher curbside traffic with large numbers of holds.  

After discussing this at length with IT, there is not an easy fix for this. One of our branches doesn’t use the CMT scheduling feature at all for preparing curbside bags in advance, and another branch refers to it roughly twice a day. These two branches operate curbside more “on demand” and prepare bags for patrons when they receive the call that the patron is in the parking lot. So for two of our branches an upgrade like this would not make much of a difference. 

In addition, appointments made with very little notice don't appear to be a common enough issue at the two branches that rely heavily on the CMT scheduler to warrant the amount of time and energy it would take to change the software. Our IT department combed through data for the past three weeks and found no instances of appointments being booked with 20 minutes notice or less. (This does not include instances where a patron shows up early or a new appointment isn't noticed immediately, thus shortening the prep time). 

Holly estimates that it would take a minimum of two to three full days of programming to add a time limit feature to our CMT. Given some of our other current IT priorities, this is not something that will be done in the immediate future, but it can be added to the wish list. 

However, the other half of this problem ("not being able to constantly check the curbside scheduler") might be easier to fix. IT can set up the ability for the scheduling program to send an email to all Information Staff at a particular branch anytime a new curbside appointment is made so that staff no longer have to continuously refresh the CMT looking for new appointments. If this does not improve the issue, Holly is open to discussing additional solutions such as adding a time limit feature to the scheduler. Branches that prefer not to be notified of new appointments via email will have the option to opt out of this feature.