Tag Archives: customer service

Training

Training Tips: The Week I Hated Every Customer Service Person I Met

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I get it.

The customer is NOT always right. Sometimes they are jerks. Sometimes they are there just to make your day miserable.

And yet: our entire job, no matter what you are doing in a library is customer service.

The entire profession is built around helping people find information they need, in whatever format they need it: verbal, books, movies, programs, toys – whatever.

Customer service is all we do.

And it’s hard. It’s hard every single day. If you let it, this part of the job will make you angry and bitter and unpleasant.

I have been thinking about this a LOT in the past couple of weeks. I needed to get new social security card, driver’s license, health insurance card, passport – all those tedious documents that you need to get through life.

I absorbed a couple of good lessons.

First: I’m an incredibly privileged person.  Yes, I know this on a daily basis, and I do work on gratitude all the time. I currently have a wonderful job that I love, I have great colleagues – in the office and around the state, I’m pretty confident every month that I’m going to afford housing AND food, and I have access to all the library books I could possibly want. These things have not always been true for me, and I’m a big believer in recognizing that all of these gifts have not arrived because I work hard or that I’m a nice person. Good things arrive in part just due to being fortunate in ways you have no influence or control over – so be grateful.

I’m immensely grateful that my daily life does not involve needing to get things from social security, the driver’s license facility, or other such offices.

Because the second thing I absorbed was not new, but worth noting: the customer service in these places is awful.

Everyone I have dealt with in the last couple of weeks hates their jobs, hates the people they deal with, and – unsurprisingly – have become hateful people. They were rude, bored, uncaring, and unhelpful. The only time they seemed to be happy with work was when they were thwarting what I asked them to do.

Fortunately for me, I did not desperately need anything from these people – because it would be horrible to have my life hanging in the balance with these people who just don’t care, or are even actively trying to make me upset. And yet: it was just awful to deal with these people who showed me such terrible service. In the midst of trying not to have a stroke in excessive annoyance and frustration with their idiocy, I did take time to be grateful that I was merely deeply annoyed – my life was not actually impacted in a big way. (Let’s see if I can actually get onto an airplane with my new ID….I’m slightly doubtful. But maybe providing some substandard, actively unhelpful, service to me made their day a little brighter. Someone should get something out of it, after all.)

And it made me think about libraries.

All libraries have hard customers, and people who drive them nuts.

But let’s strive to be better than just a knee-jerk response of annoyance and frustration to people. It’s not easy. It’s very hard. But nobody deserves to bear the brunt of our bad days – even when they are the cause of that frustration for us.

None of us are constantly perfect at customer service. I know I can look back and wince at people I’ve treated badly, or could have been better to. But in the spirit of the new year, this is a great time for all of us to think about how to improve in this area with a few basic ideas.

  • Positive attitude. Yes, this will not save you from bad patrons. But starting off being annoyed and angry will definitely cause the person you are talking with to catch those negative emotions. Work on staying positive, and see whether you can reduce or even turn around a bad situation.
  • Show a little empathy. You don’t have to overdo this – it can be exhausting and unproductive if you overindulge. But if you take a moment to empathize with the person who has screaming children (be thankful you only have them for a short time), the one who smells bad (thankful again for your indoor plumbing), who seems incapable of understanding directions or implementing them (be thankful for your skills) – it can reduce your frustration and give you a little boost of service energy to try it one more time.
  • Depersonalize situations. Hopefully you have some patrons you like, and enjoy chatting with each day. Great! But do not feel like you have to pour all your emotional energy into interacting with people who bring good or bad energy. When you remove your personal feelings from a conflict situation, no matter how small or large, it gives you a surprising boost in your ability to deal with people. (Was I a delightful example of this over the last week? No, I was not.)

You can think of many more ideas – some that work for you individually, and some that work for everyone.

You may already be a star at good customer service, you may be feeling your skills slide in the face of unrelenting annoyance from patrons. Wherever you are, it’s good to take a step back and recognize that this is a crucial skill.

We are a customer service profession. It’s all we really have and all we do. Keep striving to provide the best service you can!

 

 

 

Advocacy, Children's services, Services

Training Tips: A Librarian’s Open Letter to Jacqueline Laurita

Merrick-letter

This is an open letter from Blogger Renee Grassi, a children’s librarian. It’s a good reminder that it’s easy to be a busy library person, and to forget to be thoughtful to patrons who are challenging – but customer service is our brand. We do not “do” books, or computers, or anything else people check out of the library.  Libraries only exist to serve community members,  and the tools we use (books, computers, programs) will be ever-changing. Our only purpose is to serve our communities, to help them find information and entertainment.

It’s really hard some days, to keep focused on that mission; and there are patrons who will push your patience as far as you can go. Take some time to take a deep breath, to count to ten, and to remove personal feelings from situations as much as you can. It’s tough to be good at customer service!! But that’s no excuse for doing a bad job.

We are giving an excerpt below, and you can click here to read the whole article. There are other good resources for libraries in working with autistic people, and Renee is very interesting to read!

“When I read the story of you and your son’s experience getting kicked out of your public library my heart broke into a million pieces. For you. For your son. For your family members and friends. For other children and individuals with autism who read this story. For other parent advocates who, all too often, have had similar experiences.  For librarian parent advocates, who understand what it means to be a librarian and what it means to be a cheerleader for their child with autism.  My heart broke for the entire library community.

What you experienced does not uphold the core values of librarianship, nor does it speak to the core competencies that ALSC has developed for librarians serving children in public libraries. Time and time again, libraries are cited in research as one of the most valued and trusted institutions. But in this case, Jacqueline, the research doesn’t matter. In this case, libraries lost your trust. And for that, I am deeply sorry.

If there’s one thing I want you to know, it’s this: there are librarians who are dedicated to ensuring an experience like this does not happen at their libraries. I myself train librarians across the country how to make their library a more welcoming place to those with autism and other disabilities.  One of the things I say in these presentations is to validate people’s experiences and acknowledge their stories.  With open ears and an open heart, libraries can receive input to address positive change and make our libraries more welcoming for all.

But it’s not just me. There are many, many librarians whose hearts broke when they read your story.  These are librarians who have been working for years to make their library communities more inclusive. They would want you to know that there is admirable work happening across the country, so as to ensure that people with autism and other disabilities are authentically welcomed into their spaces.  Here are just a few of those libraries:

  • There’s Libraries and Autism: We’re Connected, which originally launched in Scotch Plains, New Jersey in 2008.  This project addresses best practices in libraries for people with autism by helping staff improve their ability to provide excellent, inclusive, universal customer service to everyone who uses the library.
  • Targeting Autism: A National Forum on Serving Patrons on the Spectrum is an IMLS grant funded program in Illinois dedicated to increasing the role of the library in supporting patrons and family members impacted by ASD. Phase II of the project is currently underway, which develops and delivers multi-faceted and replicable training programs designed to improve library services and programs for ASD communities in Illinois and across the country.
  • New York’s Project Enable provides professional development for library professionals from all types of libraries in order to build capacity for providing equitable access and services to students with disabilities.
  • The State Library of Ohio received an IMLS grant and launched a digital storytime for children with autism and their families.
  • Librarian and parent advocate Barbara Klipper has developed a grant for all types of libraries, funding innovative projects that promote inclusion of people with autism in libraries.
  • Sensory Storytime is a not-so-new program, making the storytime experience more accessible for families with children with autism.
  • Dakota County Library in Minnesota partners with the Autism Society of Minnesota offering an inclusive monthly book discussion program for young adults and adults with autism and other disabilities.
  • Iowa City Public Library offers Accessible Library Hour programming, so that families with children with autism can visit the library in a calm and welcoming environment.
  • There is even a longstanding networking group of Chicagoland youth and young adult librarians who support one another’s efforts to provide specialized services and programs to children and teens with disabilities in libraries through collaboration and training.

Librarians know that public libraries have not always been a welcoming place, and librarians themselves have not always had the best reputation. What we librarians can and should focus on is how to improve our service and do better going forward.  And there is no better person to advocate for a child’s right to access and be welcome at a public library than his or her own parent.

So, thank you, Jacqueline. Thank you for using your voice and sharing your family’s experience with your local public library, as difficult as it may have been.

I also want to thank you for leveraging your platform and sharing your family’s experience with the broader American public.  As John Cotton Dana once said, “The public library is a center of public happiness first; public education second.”  The only way for libraries to know if their community is satisfied is through authentic and regular feedback.  After all, we can only do better when we know better.”

Communication, Services

One Concept that Improves All Your Customer Service Interactions

Image result for customer service

(From CustomerThink.com, by Martha Brooke )

In the US market alone, there are hundreds of customer service consultants offering thousands of customer service improvement strategies which begs the question: does anyone need yet another customer service improvement plan? I think, decidedly, yes, for the simple reason that most customer service remains lackluster and inconsistent—while executives routinely believe their customer service is better than it really is. (For more information on this, just ask, we’re happy to share.)

So why does customer service tend to be largely reactive, inefficient, and overly transactional?

From having evaluated tens of thousands of customer service interactions, I find that when customer service disappoints it’s almost always because it has been managed in an overly general, cookie-cutter way. The result is that customers are treated more similarly than they really are, as though they have the same needs, expectations, and perceptions. But of course, that’s not true. Each customer is unique, making their inquiries at least a little bit different. So when companies treat everyone the same, rarely are customers fully engaged or completely satisfied.

Antidote! What I outline here is a plan that actually improves customer service. I know this plan works because we’ve been using it for more than a decade to improve customer service for clients in a wide array of industries. And the reason it works is that the entire plan hinges on a single proven concept—one that’s paid huge dividends for our clients: specificity. That’s specific ways to add value, relative to specific scenarios, measured by specific scoring rules, summed with specific metrics and last but not least, coached with specific model answers to build necessary customer service skills.

Continue reading One Concept that Improves All Your Customer Service Interactions →

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

What is a librarian?

I have a plan. (187/365)Warning: this post is more than two sentences long…

Librarians are at the most critical time in history to define themselves. Yet there appears to be an ongoing  struggle to find clarity/passion  around  core functions or even a desire to get real about “owning” the fantastic set of skills that librarians possess!

Library users just want help, on their terms. They are not necessarily interested in all of the cool ways that librarians manipulate the world of information, even though we very much want them to care! They just want great service for all of their needs; and one stop works best in their busy lives! But, how well does this work when librarians hold on to traditional models of what an academic, public, and school librarian do for the user? Is it possible that librarians are willing to serve the user as long as the user need fits nicely within the realm they reside in?

In our search for staying relevant and moving towards the library of the future, the library workplace  is becoming much more demanding, requiring broader skill sets. This change in expectations often causes discomfort and some even question whether an MLS is what is needed in the field!

I recently read a great blog post called What is a Librarian? on the LITA blog which examines this topic, and it is worth a read. My favorite quote from the piece is this…. “If you care about information and want to do good with it, that’s enough for me. Others are free to put more rigorous constraints on the profession if they want, but in order for libraries to survive I think we should be more focused on letting people in than on keeping people out.” Amen!  Oh wait, there is more…

In a related  post titled MLS Required, Barbara Fister writes….”… when undergraduates ask about library school I try to be realistic – jobs aren’t plentiful, the pay isn’t great, some organizations are pretty toxic. Getting a foot in the door is really hard. You will have relatives who will repeatedly use the phrase “buggy whips” and laugh. But if you do apply to library school, don’t do it because libraries feel like safe places. Get good advising, try things that you feel ill-prepared to do, challenge yourself. Because those challenges will keep coming and you might as well get the hang of it.”

Patricia-

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/qc788l4, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Academic, Check this out:

Why do people love their library?

Snow TracksBrian Mathews is Associate Dean for Learning and Outreach at Virginia Tech, and usually has interesting things to say about libraries. Brian shares….”It is easy to develop assumptions about what a library is or what it should be, especially if you work in administration. But I encourage everyone to stop once in a while and ask people why they are in your building. Not just what they are doing, but why library space instead of anywhere else. The answers may surprise you.”

Some of the stories he tells remind me of why I frequented the library during my college career! Read Brian’s post at Why do people who love libraries love libraries?

 

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/m484bpg, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0