[Publib] Brief and possibly muddled meditation on "customer service"

[Havens,Andy]

Trends always come in pairs... like old sayings. As a kid I was confused
by the proximity of a hallway "Look before you leap" poster related to
some kind of college-choice program down the hall from our gym, where
"He who hesitates is lost" was posted r.e. football. So... do I look
without hesitating before leaping and losing? So confused.

The bookend trend for "the death of customer service" is Kevin Kelly's
"Better than free:"

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php

It's an excellent post, in general, about the ways in which
organizations can add value above-and-beyond the inherent content that
is, often, freely copyable or distributable on the Web. Kelly refers to
these value-added efforts as "generative values" because they must be
generated, grown, nurtured, etc.

What struck me on my initial reading of this piece is that libraries
have been adding "generative values" to free (as far as many users are
concerned) content for a very long time. Four of his eight generatives
seemed especially appropriate for library service:

* Interpretation
* Authenticity
* Accessibility
* Findability

Some good things to ponder there.

I'd also agree, very strongly, with those who have said that
self-service is not the opposite of customer service, but a *type of*
customer service. History says, things that can be automated *will be.*
It's part of the job of anyone who interfaces with customers to figure
out how to work that automation into the overall scheme of customer
service.

An example: like most libraries, the public branch I use has a book
return slot on the outside for after-hours returns... but many
(including me) will pull up along the indicated curb, jump out, and use
the slot even during the day. Self service. During heavy return hours
(5-7 pm, is my guess), the library will augment this by having staff
(and a security guard) outside, at the curb, taking books right from
your car window and putting them onto a cart. Why? If they don't, you
get either a line of cars out to the street, or a whole bunch of people
taking up parking spaces just to do a return and keeping them from folks
who want to actually spend some times. It's a good mix of self service
and wickedly good customer service. Not either/or: both.


- A
Andy Havens
OCLC: Manager, Branding and Creative Services

-----Original Message-----
From: publib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:publib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of John
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 5:39 PM
To: publib
Subject: [Publib] Brief and possibly muddled meditation on "customer
service"

I'm a little slow, but I have just perused the pages of the March 24
issue of Time Magazine--"10 Ideas that are Changing the World."  One of
them is "the end of customer service."  Kiosks at airports, no
attendants anywhere, for whatever reason, etc., in any place of
business.

And then there are verifiably human librarians who talk about nothing
but customer service.  Which, on the one hand, seems to have to do with
warm and empathetic personal contacts with our customers...but on the
other, might have to do with self-check stations.  Which is it to
be?--one, the other, or both?

Personal encounters with the brave new world and the old world....  At
PLA, on the return home, I checked in at a kiosk (a word I'd never heard
until I returned to library school, briefly, circa 1994...which reminds
me that "interface" was a hotly debated word or non-word when I went to
library school the *first* time) at the Northwest Airlines counter,
where humans seemed to be doing mostly one thing, i.e., taking luggage.
Except that they were doing that only when enough luggage had moved on
down the line so that there was room for more luggage.  Which was not a
fast process.  I confidently approached the kiosk, having dealt with one
on the way *to* Minneapolis.  And got this message, or a variation on
it: "We're sorry, we cannot assign a seat at this time/place/whatever.
Please check in at the boarding gate."  Oh.  Right.  How silly of me to
think that I might actually be able to get a seating assignment at the
kiosk, even though I had received one at the kiosk in Peoria four days
earlier.

I went to the boarding gate, where I was welcomed (?) by one of the
grouchiest, meanest airline staff persons I've ever encountered.  I
should've had, not a V8, but a kiosk.

And, not so long ago, I read some reasonably reputable reports of
studies done on human beans, to the effect that...Americans *say* that
we want and VALUE good customer service, and gripe about, e.g., stores
where we can't get it.  But when it comes right down to it, in fact,
Americans want the cheapest prices possible for anything/everything, and
cheapness trumps customer service nearly every time.

I don't know what this all means, but I was tired of thinking about
long-range planning and where to put the oversize books, as we shift
collections around (which is only somewhat related to long-range
planning), so I pondered customer service.  And I've now written two
pieces on "excellent personalized customer service," or something like
it, for our bi-monthly newsletter.  Maybe the next time around I should
say that I take it all back, and we're going to start being the
anti-customer service library, like the anti-heroes of 1960s-1070s
movies.

John D. Richmond, Director & Alpha Male Philosopher @ the...
Alpha Park Public Library District
3527 So. Airport Road
Bartonville, IL 61607
Ph: (309) 697-3822, ext. 12
Fax: (309) 697-9681
E-mail: jrichmond at alphapark.org
_________________________________________________
"To do two things at once is to do neither." -- Publilius Syrus, 1st
century B.C.  


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