Subscribe Feed (RSS)To online investigators: “Can I help you find anything?”
November 25th, 2008 by Richard K Miller | Filed under Mormon, Online missionary work, Technology.If you're new here, read more about the More Good Foundation. We help members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church) share their beliefs on the Internet. Learn more about what Mormons believe or talk with Mormons at LDS.net.
A new analytics program called Woopra allows website operators to not only see who is visiting their website in realtime but to initiate a conversation with them. This has interesting implications for online missionary work since it means that investigators could be offered help as they search online.
Here is a 3-minute video demonstrating Woopra on MormonWiki.com:
This strikes me as the online equivalent of the store clerk who asks, “Can I help you find anything?” You usually answer, “No, I’m just looking around.”
Elder Cook has touted privacy as one of the great benefits of learning about the gospel online:
“There are a lot of people today who would like to know more about our faith but they are concerned about having their privacy invaded. They want to look at things in their own time and in their own way. They do not want to feel like they have any pressure…. We feel that the Internet and the privacy that it affords people is a wonderful way to do that….” (Internet to find, Missionaries to Teach)
I suspect that most people will prefer not to be interrupted while searching for information about the Church. However, I wonder if a small handful of people would appreciate being offered some help?
I’ve been using Woopra for over a month. I’ve never initiated a conversation with a visitor and I don’t think I would. It is interesting to watch live as a visitor clicks on different links in a post. Sometimes I can predict where they will click next once they have already clicked on a few links. Also sometimes I notice certain patterns in conjunction with their search string that cause me to be able to return to a post and add an update that includes useful information.
@Rick: I’m glad to hear you’ve been using it. I found myself doing what you did recently — when someone searched for “Who is the Mormon prophet?” I realized the “Mormon prophets” article didn’t actually say who the current prophet is, so I added it. There’s something about watching the keywords, the flow between pages, and timing in real-time that seems to make it easier (in my opinion) to guess the visitors’ intent and be more empathetic to what they might be looking for.
Wow… that is a great analytics program. I have been using Google Analytics for a couple of years, but this looks leaps and bounds ahead of them. Is it free? Guess I will have to check it out!
Hey guys - great use of Jing for the Screencast (full disclosure, I work for TechSmith, the company that makes Jing.)
I just started following your blog. As an instructional designer and technology geek, I think its interesting (and cool) to see and think about how technology could be applied to the helping Church members to reach out.
It seems that the privacy issue is an important one, but if Woopra would allow you to show the visitor that there is an administer online and ready to answer questions - it would be a lot less intrusive. Otherwise, just popping in to see if the person has questions on the web seems less helpful and more creepy.
@Jeff VanDrimmelen: Yes, Woopra is free right now, though we had to wait a couple weeks before we were approved for the beta program.
@Matt: Thanks for saying hello! Kudos to you and TechSmith for Jing! We use it internally all the time and love it. (BTW, is it possible to embed the Jing video on this blog instead of linking to the full-screen version?) You may be right about chat — perhaps people will only want the *option* to chat. Woopra doesn’t really collect more information than any other analytics program, but it does feel a bit creepy to be singled out as a visitor instead of being examined collectively.
When I go to a store like Home Depot, sometimes I know exactly what I want and I would prefer that the employees just leave me alone to find what I’m looking for and make my purchase as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if I can’t find something, don’t understand how things are organized, or simply am looking for an “expert” to guide me, I love having someone I can pick out of the crowd (i.e., orange aprons?) to get me pointed in the right direction.
Woopra sounds helpful, but even better would be an intelligent tool that…
1. Identifies when a site “expert” is available to help
2. Allows for custom rules to identify when a user may require help.
3. Displays an unobtrusive modal dialogue box mentioning that an “expert” is available to assist them, if needed.
@David: Good points. I suppose black name tags are the Church’s “orange apron”, aren’t they? I wonder if Mormon.org’s chat feature would be used more often — not that I know how much it’s used — if each page of Mormon.org had a small headshot of a full-time missionary with the text “Available to chat”. And, assuming they don’t already have this, it’d be nice if the missionary could tell which page the person was currently on and which pages they had already visited.