Episode 502: Customer Service

Welcome back to Season Five of Linking Our Libraries!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. This season we are working through some skills that people in any kind of library will need to be successful in their work.

This week we will be talking about Customer Service in your library, and how to make it work for you. Attentive listeners may be thinking “Hey! Didn’t you guys already do this topic?” Good catch! We did – way back in Season Two, episode 210. We link to it here, and it would be worth your time to go back and listen or read our show notes.  This is such an important topic – the foundation of everything we do in the library really – and it’s also such a hard thing to always do well, that we wanted to cover it again.

This week we have Guest Host Kathy Parker, Director of the St John’s/St Ben’s academic libraries, to help us get some ideas!

The Basics:

We all know customer service is important. We all know bad customer service when we experience it as a customer, and probably we all know about it from a provider side. If it was as simple as being nice to people, customer service would be simple. But it’s not simple. Even the nicest person has wanted to clobber a patron at some point – and probably it was entirely justified!

But we are a customer service profession. Anyone who is missing that – who thinks that we are doing people a favor by giving them books and computers – is completely missing the point of our entire profession and our work. We are here only to serve our community – whether it is geographic, as in a public library, or organization-specific as in a school or academic library. No matter what your job title is, no matter what tasks you do in a day – you are only there to serve the information needs of your community. You might as well be good at it!

So, we can we do in libraries to provide good customer service?

First: talk about it. A lot. Say that we value it when we talk about work. Share strategies for getting through tough situations when you have staff meetings or other opportunities to chat. Talk about bad service we have seen or received. The more it is part of the conversation, the more everyone realizes that it is also part of your culture.

Know what you are talking about. We’ve all been in conversations with people who are clearly winging it – and it’s infuriating when the person who is supposed to be helping you is obviously making up rules as the conversation develops. Know your policies and procedures. (We will talk about them more in a couple of weeks!) Know what you can and cannot do. And when you don’t know – because you can’t know everything – stop and ask someone. If there is noone to ask, let the patron know you will get back to them when you have a real answer. Don’t make something up just to get through a situation.

Listen to people. When you have been behind a desk for a year, or twenty, it’s easy to assume you’ve heard it all, and to try to jump to the end of a patron request. Instead, take some time to listen to what the person is saying – and what they are not saying. It may take some questions, it make take a couple of extra minutes, and you may have to hear a bunch of irrelevant details on the way to the important part. But you don’t want to miss that important part. And in our hurry-up society, you might be the only person who actually listened to that person today. Let them feel valued.

Go back to your basic manners. Say “I’m sorry this happened” when something has gone wrong for a patron. It doesn’t matter that you had nothing to do with it, couldn’t have prevented it, or don’t even believe there’s a real problem. Again, you are valuing what the person is saying. And, selfishly, it takes the wind out of someone getting ready to wind up for a tantrum if you lead with an apology.

Likewise, say thank you and ask if there is anything else you can do for the person. Remember: we are here to serve them and their information needs. Be sure you have all of that wrapped up before you leave that person. How nice would it be if you, personally, were responsible for even half of the people you interact with today being happier than they were before they talked to you? That’s good service!

Cut yourself a break. Some people are just awful, and you are not always going to be be wonderful at providing great service. It’s fine. The customer is not always right. Sometimes the customer needs to be escorted out by a teacher, by security, or by the police. Take a moment to shake it off, and go back to your skills in good service to the next person.

So, we’ve talked about some idea here, and we have links to a bunch of other ones on our show notes page  – check it out for all the details. Now, let’s talk with Kathy to get some ideas about how customer service really plays out in a library!

Additional Resources:

Books Read

The Peripheral, by William Gibson

Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go.

Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. 

Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.

Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic,
by Leigh Bardugo

Love speaks in flowers. Truth requires thorns.

Travel to a world of dark bargains struck by moonlight, of haunted towns and hungry woods, of talking beasts and gingerbread golems, where a young mermaid’s voice can summon deadly storms and where a river might do a lovestruck boy’s bidding but only for a terrible price.

Perfect for new readers and dedicated fans, the tales in The Language of Thorns will transport you to lands both familiar and strange―to a fully realized world of dangerous magic that millions have visited through the novels of the Grishaverse.

This collection of six stories includes three brand-new tales, each of them lavishly illustrated and culminating in stunning full-spread illustrations as rich in detail as the stories themselves.

Circe, by Madeline Miller

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child–not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power–the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.

Conclusion

Thanks to Kathy for coming in to work through this topic with us! Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to get all the library skills directly to your favorite app each week. And you can check out our shownotes for each episode to get all the info we discussed, along with the links to more resources. Every episode we have created is on our website: cmle.org.

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Thanks for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week for another library competency!