Customer Service

My first post is going to be hitting on an issue that is a fundamental part of any library, and that is the tentative happy world of Customer Service.  This thought inspired by an article that I read in CILIP Update this morning about library assistants being hired from customer care backgrounds.

With the increasing realisation that a ‘library’ in the typical sense of the word is evolving to include other services such as internet access (after all how would we access half of the information that we provide?), the expectations of users are changing, in a world of the customer always being right, libraries are doing their best to keep up.
So what does customer service mean in a LIS environment?  Well the ability to keep up with new expectations and demands that our ‘customers’ demand, after all we are not just a depository of books and archive material, the modern library is a proactive, resourceful and efficient operation.

At Exeter College, we are all aware of customer service and spend most of our time serving users, or customers, as they are known with a lot of smiling and a proactive attitude.  Some libraries that I have visited before in the past are still in the dark ages when it comes to treating users like customers, but with expectations of libraries falling in to the same pot as other customer focused environments like retail, hotels etc.  shouldn’t we redress them as Information Shops?  Infoshop.org is a stunning example of this at work.
The idea that libraries can be rebranded is not new, but once rebranded, it stops being a library and becomes something totally different, a shop.  Think about how close and similiar a shop is with a library, from that one can see that customer service is just as important here in our library as it is in any shop.