What difference does an IM widget make?

A year ago, our Ask Us page looked like this. Then in August we added a widget that lets patrons start typing their questions right away without clicking through layers of links and filling out forms. I thought the effects of that would be a slight bump to the stats. Check out what happened instead. Comparing Sep '06 - June '07 to Sep '07 - June '08, we had a 55% increase in IMs!