Now Serving Customer 7,528,413

Abstract

This is the second reflective essay that Lorraine J. Pellack has contributed to Reference & User Services Quarterly (RUSQ). She created a buzz with her guest editorial, First Impressions and Rethinking Reference Questions (see RUSQ 49, no. 1 [Fall 2009]: 4, 6). She continues the discussion on the importance of service excellence in this provocative piece.--Editor Libraries ... are dedicated to serving their customers. Their mission statements attest to this goal, and even relatively junior staff members have been told again and again that service is a top priority. At the same time, customer service takes time away from real work and is widely viewed as a frill. It even seems that while more lip service is paid to it, the quantity and quality of customer service may actually have declined in the past twenty years. (1) Reading this statement for the first time positively chilled me to the bone. Woodward is very direct at describing workplace climates where staff are increasingly unhappy working with the general public, stretched with multitasking, and have continually evolving job descriptions. She hints that the decline of quantity is probably due to budget cuts with fewer staff being stretched thin but spends most of this chapter talking about possible causes in quality decline, which whittle down to motivation, job satisfaction, and adapting to change. Both quantity and quality of services are seriously important concerns and can be observed at a department or organization level as well as at an individual level. WHO ARE YOU, AS A LIBRARY, SERVING? Libraries, by their very nature, are public service organizations--even corporate and special libraries. Serving the needs of patrons is paramount to fulfilling the library mission. Yet, when making decisions about new services, cutting services, or finding solutions to problems, the patron point of view is often not considered, is considered only lightly, or is overridden by higher budgetary priorities. When budgets are examined for places to cut, services that are considered tangential are targeted, especially services that do not have readily-visible benefits. Checkout rates, door counts, and shelving statistics are all easily quantifiable and enable circulation departments to readily justify numbers of staff needed to maintain basic circulation services. On the down side, many other library services are not so readily quantifiable: * finding a misshelved book for a researcher faster than they could have received it via ILL * helping a graduate student find a key reference for their dissertation * troubleshooting access problems for a patron trying to access a journal article * providing stapler, hole-punch and/or pencil sharpeners in convenient locations * equipping printers with both single and double-sided printing * ensuring computer workstations are functioning properly or repaired quickly * relieving angst of a patron who cannot find sufficient articles for their term paper A colleague of mine once said, Cutting services (for whatever reason) is like amputating your feet because the price of shoes is increasing. Yes, we could try going barefoot--and in some climates that might be doable--however, that is missing the point. It's time we stop worrying about the price of the shoes and focus instead on the impact shoes might have on someone's life. So, how does one show impact of a service on someone's life? At what level should increasing enrollments in distance education programs justify shipping library books to remote students in spite of library budget cuts? Does replacing a human being with an automated phone system make sense in a service-oriented environment? When does it become acceptable to provide a service for the greater good even if it flies in the face of budgetary frugality? Staying financially afloat is important but at what cost to our future customer loyalty and perceived usefulness? …