Businesses leverage excellent customer service to improve profitability. Although not profitdriven, libraries should leverage excellent customer service to achieve their unique missions. Evaluating and improving customer service practices will help a library determine if it is successfully serving its customers. The library should review three areas to improve customer service: the physical space of the library, how library employees work with library policies, and the communication skills of the library staff. By using the Take Five model, the library can make immediate, no-cost changes or plan for future improvements by taking just five minutes, every day, to assess specific areas. Over a few weeks or months, these small changes will result in better customer service.
Take Five for Customer ServiceCustomer service is the most important, but often overlooked, element of running a business or a library. If a business fails to focus on customer service, it may lose sales, and thus, income. If a library fails to focus on customer service, it does not lose profits, but it loses good will, customers, and possibly even funding if the situation is bad enough. Small, incremental changes can lead to great improvements. Libraries can make customer service a priority by making changes in just five minutes a day, using the Take Five model.
Imagine this…A customer who is lecturing you on appropriate collection development policies has cornered you, the library director. While listening to a discourse on proper social standards for libraries, you observe the following:
"It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: "This is water."" (Wallace 2005) http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI This paper is wholeheartedly dedicated to the thirteen undergraduates who enriched our lives during the summer and fall of 2014 by demonstrating how far education can go when, in spite of limitations, there are motivation and inspiration! Abstract: We describe an effort to teach non-science majors' general education courses using the SENCER paradigm, namely, to "strengthen student learning and interest in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics by connecting course topics to issues of critical local, national, and global importance."
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