Answering your county's "Ask an Expert" questions

By: John Dorner and ...

From January 1 through March 31, 2011, there have been about 500 questions submitted through the county and eXtension Ask an Expert widgets from North Carolina people.  Some counties have received more than others, but it's averaged to about 5 questions per county.  I believe the top 2 counties are Guilford with 31 questions since January 1 and Forsyth with 21 questions.

NC is ranked #1 in the number of questions received.  But, we are ranked #2 in the number of unanswered questions. As I write this, we have 29 unanswered questions. I just closed a question because it had been waiting for an answer for more than a month.  It was an easy question for an agent in that county to answer - "Where can I get 5-10 bales of straw for a straw raised garden?"  Not only would this be an easy question to answer, it would have given the agent an opportunity to establish a relationship with a new client and get them accustomed to coming to us when they have their next gardening question.  Instead, that customer has probably written Extension off as unresponsive.  We can't tell who is at the other end of that question.  It could be a county commissioner, or a senator's spouse. At this time (or any time), we can't afford to ignore our customers.

Ask an Expert questions should be treated the same as phone calls or walk in visitors.  You wouldn't think of not returning a phone call or having someone wait for days in the lobby.  But, Ask an Expert questions can be answered much easier and faster than any phone call or office visit.  You can search all of the previous answers to see if you or anyone else has answered a similar question and use that as the basis of the answer for the current question. They are much faster to answer because you don't have to talk about the weather, listen to their rant about their neighbor or other non-related things out of courtesy.

Please don't discount a question because it came from the website.  These questions are just as important to the person who submitted them as a question from someone who calls your office.  Like the one asking about whether or not a certain creek is polluted and safe for their child to play near.

Research* tells us that the answer is perceived as more useful when received within 48 hours and 'dissatisfaction' with the answer increases the longer it . I'd like to challenge every employee in NCCE to make a commitment to answer every question assigned to them within 48 hours. If you can't answer the question, don't just click "Hand off to a question wrangler", assign it to someone you think can and will answer the question.

My recommendation is to have the secretaries signed up to get the questions automatically routed to them - not to the agents.  They should treat these as phone calls coming in and answer them or route them to the appropriate person - which sometimes might be an agent in a neighboring county.  I base this recommendation on the assumption that the secretaries are more likely to be in the office and would know if an agent is out or won't be able to respond within a reasonable amount of time.

If you have more than one secretary in your office, having the secretaries signed up to get the questions from your county's widget auto-assigned to them, each one will receive just their share (half if there are two) of the questions.

I would also recommend that all secretaries and possibly the CED "join the community"  for your county widget so they can get notified whenever any questions are submitted from the county widget. This way, when someone is out of the office on vacation, someone else will be notified.

Every agent should have at least one area of expertise and their geographic regions identified in their preferences. Keep in mind that "areas of expertise" is not the same as "areas of responsibility".

ANYONE with an eXtension ID can go in and answer or reassign questions.  The more people we get answering questions, the easier it is for all of us. The objective is not 'ownership'.  The objective should be customer service.  If you know the answer to a question, answer it - even if it isn't assigned to you.

I'd suggest that all NCCE faculty and staff have their AaE filters set to view questions from all sources, all categories for North Carolina.  If you want to narrow it down to just your county, that would be fine too.  But the more people we have looking at the NC questions, the faster they will get answered.

* Ask an Expert: Findings and Decisions - http://www.slideshare.net/k1v1n/ask-an-expert-findings-and-decisions
* “Ask An Expert” - Problem Resolution Narratives Final Report - Jan to May 2009
http://create.extension.org/sites/default/files/w/b/b4/090529_-AAE-_Final_Report_.pdf