The Reject screen

The Reject function in the Answer menu list brings up the screen shown above.

You can use this screen to send a message to the client explaining why their question cannot be handled by your information service, and to close the question in the same action.  Note that an option to not send a message to the client is also provided.  If you are using this option to close out a spam question, be sure that choose NOT to send an email to the spammer.

If you are rejecting a question that is not allocated to you, you will be given the opportunity to have an email sent to the staff member who was allocated the question, to advise them of the rejection, and that no further work is required on the question. After the question is rejected, it will be reallocated to you for statistical purposes as you have taken the ultimate responsibility in closing this question.

For statistical purposes the “Progress” of this question is set to “Completed” (just as it would be if the question had been Answered) when the question is Rejected so that Rejected questions can be easily included in statistics about the number of questions handled by your service.

Note that in the Question summary section, the Request type information is provided in a drop down box. This is so that you can easily change the Request type, if necessary, at the same time as you reject it.  Your System Administrator may have set up some of your Request forms so that when you first work on a question Request type is set to [ select option ] so that you must “classify” the question on receipt.  The Request type drop down at this point displays all of the Request types under their appropriate Request groups, making it easy to assign an appropriate Request type.

Exercise

Use this screen to reject the question that you have been working on. Note that previously you reallocated this question to another staff member so this shows that you can even close a question allocated to other staff. Also note that despite having done a lot of work on this question we are still able to reject the question as simply as filling out this screen.

To reject the question:Choose a rejection status.Enter an explanation for the client that will be included in the email to them(don’t forget that you can use QuickText in this field)Enter any additional explanatory information in the database note. Database notes can never be seen by the client.

Note that this is also a QuickText enabled field Decide on the client notification required. And if the question is allocated to someone else, decide on whether an email should be sent to the allocated staff member by ticking the supplied box.

Click on Save. The question will then be closed and the explanation sent to the client, and notice sent to the staff member of the rejection, if you have chosen to do this. At the same time a record of all these actions will be saved in the History tab of the Summary screen.

An email is sent to client on rejection of a question

This is the email sent to the client on rejection of a question.

Note that it includes the comment from the librarian, and provides the ability for the client to send a comment about the service they received.