OverDrive Support Course Week 5: Putting It All Together

A Review

You’ve made it!  It’s the last week of your introduction to OverDrive technical support.

Hopefully, you now have….

  • A methodology of how to troubleshoot and respond to questions from patrons.
  • Experience using some of the reports and tools you’ll need to hunt down answers.
  • Answers to the most common questions.
  • Ideas on how to get more help.

Before you go out into the wild world of OverDrive support, a little more on that last point.

When you start doing support for real, you’ll get questions that you can’t answer right away.  They will be weird, uncommon, and downright hard.  In those moments, don’t forget a few things:

Stick with your “scientific approach."  Develop a theory, get some clues, try to confirm.  There are moments when you will find yourself thinking, “I don’t know!!!  Go away!!”  It’s okay to think that for a minute, and then you can get to solving the problem.

Get help. You can ask other people you know who provide support or submit a support request to OverDrive.  Here’s how to do that:

  • Log into Marketplace (https://marketplace.overdrive.com)
    • Click “Support” in the menu bar
    • Scroll to the bottom and choose “Technical Support”
    • Fill in the form.  Some tips:
      • Choose your issue category carefully.  It will determine what other information you will be required to provide.
      • If there is required information you can’t provide, ask the patron for the information before submitting the form, at least to start.  As you get more comfortable with the common issues, you’ll know when a piece of information that is required by OverDrive is not really necessary to resolve the issue.  To start, though, it’s always best to provide them with the information they ask for.
      • You’ll get an automated response.  Then you wait for a real response.
      • Review response received from OverDrive and pass along to the patron.
      • If the issue is not resolved by the reply, there are two things to keep in mind:
        • When you receive a reply, a specific technical support person will be assigned to the question. Your best bet is to reply to the solution you receive if you need more help.  It may take a day or two for a response if that particular technical support person is not available.
        • Cases will close if there is no activity on the question.  So, for example, if you send a question into OverDrive, they respond, you send the response to the patron, and the patron waits two weeks to let you know that it didn’t work, you’ll need to start a new support request.  You will receive a message when the case is closed.  We file those messages away so we know if a particular case has been closed.

Know when to fold them.  There will be questions that, for whatever reason, you can’t resolve through email.  It’s okay to encourage people to come to the library for more hands-on support.  There will be times when there is no good answer.  It will feel bad to tell people that there is nothing you can do to help, but you will have to do that occasionally.  We’ve had back-and-forth conversations with people that have lasted WAY too long (over 46 messages, for example).  If you’re making progress, keep working with the patron.  If there is no more information to give them or nothing else to try, you have to let go.  An example of this is if there is an issue with a specific type of device, but you can still help point them to where they can go for device support (Amazon, Apple, etc.). Here are more tips on how to deal with a tricky problem.

Resources

Here are the resources from the course that will serve as valuable reference material as you provide support for OverDrive to your patrons, plus a few extra:

Assignments

  1. This week, there is no quiz but there is a fairly difficult support request to respond to. This one will most likely need some back-and-forth between you and the "patron" so don't wait until Friday to respond!