Going on vacation? Don't forget your Ask an Expert widget

What's a reasonable time for responding to questions from the eXtension Ask an Expert widgets?

An "Ask an Expert" task force surveyed people who had used the widget and learned that answers received in 2 days or less were much more likely to play an important role in helping the questioner solve their problem.

The Faculty/Agent focus group stated that 48 hours seems to be a reasonable amount of time to answer a question. In most cases, it only takes a few minutes to answer a question. Less if you search and find the question has been asked and answered before.

See: Ask an Expert Task Force Findings and Decisions for more information.

I'd say the audience expects and deserves the same response time as any other question coming into your office - a day or two at the most. If it takes you more than a couple days to get an answer to a client, they've moved on and probably found another source. But, what's more important, they won't be back. Negative marketing is worse than no marketing and it takes much longer to recover from.

So, what can you do to make sure your audience gets a timely response when you are on vacation or just too busy to respond in a timely manner?

Here are some ideas I have... Please comment with any you might have!

• Stop getting questions assigned to you until you return. From http://www.extension.org/aae/prefs/widget_preferences deselect any widgets you are auto-assigned to get.

• If you are a AaE Wranger, uncheck the "Be a question Wranger" box at: http://www.extension.org/aae/prefs

• If you have a widget on some of your pages, make sure someone else is prepared to answer the questions coming in through that widget. They can get to the questions from the "Incoming" page at: http://www.extension.org/aae/incoming and how to add a filter list from the Widget Preferences page.

• Remove the AaE widget from your pages. For NCCE web sites, go to: the Administrative view for your web site and click on "Ask Widget" at the bottom of the left navigation bar. For blogs or other sites, comment out the code for the widget so you can add it back when you return. This can cause other problems if you've marketed the availability of the widget on your site.
  

What are your thoughts, suggestions or solutions?