Seamless customer experience

I was just reading Coreen Bailor’s article in the October 2006 issue of Customer Relations Management ... in it, she says ...

Naturally, good customer service often leads to customer expanding their
dealings with you. One way to begin: Ensure that frontline reps are well
trained, and equipped with access to a comprehensive knowledge base and to
customer history.

So, I started thinking ... how does this apply to libraries?

Most frontline library staff take one or two classes/training sessions per year ... and those tend to be policy or procedure based ... if we want to get serious about customer service, maybe we should offer customer-oriented service training ... the kind of stuff done by Disney, Nordstrom, Ritz-Carleton, and Southwest Airlines ... and of course it will mean we need to give staff time off the desk to learn, practice, and learn some more ...

In addition, we’ll need to update and improve our tools ... and not just add stuff like Ebsco’s NoveList, Thompson-Gale’s What Do I Read Next, or Books-in-Print ... that’s all good stuff, but we need to harness their individual strengths and integrate them with our ILSs, with Google and its ilk, coming-of-age social networking toys, and with our own locally created content ... that’s our knowledge base ...

And lastly, we need to be able to give staff access to systems that describe our patrons’ patterns of use of information and services ... with the training staff get, the use of these systems will ensure a tighter match between knowledge seeker and knowledge asset ... the main problem I anticipate here is that we’re scared to keep the information ... it might be discoverable ...

Okay ... I didn’t say it was easy or without potholes ...