Clients entering Questions using RefTracker forms in your web pages

Using the RefTracker client interface or individual RefTracker request forms inserted in your web pages, clients can submit questions for response by your information delivery service.  Request forms are designed by your System administrator to meet the specific reference interview needs of each different type of request that you handle. This means that they can be as simple or complex as they need to be to perform the reference interview for that particular type of request, and they can be embedded in your web page, or open in a new window.  Here’s an example of a very simple form embedded in a web page.

Questions submitted by clients appear in Open questions where staff can pick up the question and provide a response. According to the design of the form used by the client, their question may arrive as an unallocated question or be automatically allocated to a staff member who will receive an email advising them of the arrival of the question and providing links that they can use to go into RefTracker to provide a response.  Questions arriving as unallocated may have an email sent to a specified email address(es), to let staff know that it has arrived so they can pick it up without having to notice it in the RefTracker Open questions screen.
The form can even build in data that is known about the user of the form or their request, for example, in the example shown above, the form might build in that this is a high priority request, so that it appears in the Open questions screen with a highlighting exclamation mark to indicate that it needs to be answered quickly.

Clients updating entered questions using the client interface screens

Once a question has been entered, clients can update the question using any of the features of the client interface – such as the ability to change the question or cancel it. Questions will also be directly updated by the client when you send them a Query to client, and they respond to that query.

When a client updates a question, the status of the question will go to “Updated by client”, and the details of the update will be added to the History/Correspondence tabs. The new status of the question is hyperlinked in your Open questions screen to highlight that a client update needs to be responded to, and if the question is allocated to a staff member, the staff member receives an email advising them of the update and asking them to address it.

When a client cancels a question, the status of the question will go to “Cancelled by client”, and the allocated staff member, or, if the question has not been allocated to any staff member since its arrival, any email address specified to receive a notification email, will receive an email advising them that no further work is required on that question.

When the client interface pages are used to make these changes, the client will see a confirmation that their change has been made, on the next screen to display.