Sara, Margaret and I have done some number crunching of about 540 AskLive transcripts from Sept-Dec 2011 and wanted to share a bit of the data we got before getting distracted by other concerns…

When people contact us
Monday to Friday were the busiest days of the week, but we still got almost 13% of the week’s traffic in the weekend (about evenly divided between the two days). Of the weekdays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the busiest (over 20% each day) and Friday the quietest (13%).

The busiest times of day were from 9am – 5pm, especially 11am – 2pm. Between 5-6 was generally quiet, followed by a spike from 6-7pm slightly above the number of queries from 12noon – 1pm. But we got queries at all hours (including, if a glitch meant we didn’t log off overnight, the occasional one at 3am).

Where people contact us from
We looked at IP addresses for this and for various reasons this data isn’t perfect, but it does give a good indication.

44% of queries came from on campus – two thirds of these were from university computers, and one third from the wireless network (laptops etc).

47% of the remaining queries came from within New Zealand – of this number, 64% within Christchurch; 21% from Auckland, 5% from Wellington, 6% from various other towns, and 3% we couldn’t identify which area of New Zealand.

4% were queries from overseas.

5% we couldn’t identify the source at all.

How much they appreciate the service
This was very much a work in process but of the 198 transcripts coded, 172 conversations included some form of ‘thank you’ from the user for a total of 338 times – often including multiple exclamation marks and smiley faces. 🙂

Deborah