blyberg.net » From bad sausages to good hospitality

Last month, at Internet Librarian, I stayed at the Monterey Marriott. Like most other hotels, they provided me with a customer satisfaction survey. I always fill those out because, as a Marriott Rewards Platinum member, I have a feeling they track that stuff in some kind of uber-database, which means it will somehow benefit me somewhere along the aggregate.

Overall, my stay was fantastic. It was close to the conference (couldn’t really be much closer), I was upgraded to an executive suite, had a great view, and felt that my needs, as modest as they are, were well taken care of. With the exception of the sausages. The sausages they brought to my room for breakfast were in rough shape. I can easily overlook that, however, and I did. Except that I marked down the food in the survey.

And I would have completely forgotten about those bad bangers, if it were not for an email I received last week:

After taking the time to review your response, I was concerned by the rating which you gave to breakfast overall that you had at Three Flags Cafe. Please accept my sincere apology for our failure to provide you with the overall quality to which you were expecting while dining with us.

I would certainly appreciate hearing from you personally, Mr. Blyberg, so that we can gain more insight into your dissatisfaction with the overall quality of service that you received. We had always taken great pride in providing the highest quality of service to our guests and we regret this was not your experience.

We value your feedback and appreciate your loyalty and I certainly hope that I will have the opportunity to speak with you soon. You may contact me personally at [snip] or by e-mail at [snip]. It is our pleasure to serve you and the next time you visit in Monterey please feel free to contact me prior to your visit as we want your next visit to be a 10!

Not bad. They turned something that was really not a big deal into an opportunity to show they care about me as their guest. Granted, I’ll just skip the room service in the future and head across the street to Pinos, but of course I’ll continue to stay there.

This underscored, for me, the fact that our ILS, in addition to everything else it does, needs to function as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. This anecdote is exactly the type of story I’d want told about MPOW. Where are the most complaints lodged? At the circulation and reference desks, of course. And what tools, other than social grace and Job’s patience, do librarians have when taking them? Email? email who, what, and why? Or better yet, the old, “let me write your name down on this piece of reference scrap and never get back to you” trick?

No, we need practical ways of tracking complains–who is making them, what they’re complaining about, how often, time of day, and so on. Then, most importantly, we need to follow-up with the patron and let them know that we still love them.

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11 Comments so far

I’ve been thinking about this too. I’d be interested in hearing if any libraries are already using standalone ‘crm’ or issue tracking software for this sort of thing, and what software, and how it’s working for them.

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Hmm. . . it sounds to me more like you got a form letter they send to anyone with a breakfast-related complaint (and I’d guess that the lunch and dinner ones are awfully similar, too). I suppose something like this comment board would be hard to reproduce for a hotel serving thousands of customers, but I’d like to think that, since libraries are local community organizations, we could do a bit better.

Jonathan, I would like to know that too. It’s something we’ve been thinking about. I want to make sure, however, that whatever we do integrates nicely with our existing ILS and is easy and intuitive for our staff.

Laura, You’re right, I’m sure they do have canned responses for the more common complaints, but someone still had to process my handwritten evaluation and make sure the information went to the right place. Also, it invited me to call the responsible person directly and tell them my sausages were “sub-optimal” in-person.

John -

In some worlds every single customer interaction has a “bingo card” survey attached to it. I prefer not to live in those worlds, but some people do.

The CRM systems I have lived in typically have some goal attached to them, usually maximizing sales. When you want to really make people happy independent of sales, you look to measure customer satisfaction, and if you’re in a certain world you compensate people based on how happy the customers are (out of your marketing budget).

Ed,
Most CRM systems are highly specialized for the industry they are intended for. They are also highly customizable. It follows that if your company’s goal is to maximize sales, that will be reflected in the way you deploy and use your CRM. There does need to be a ROI for something like this, after all.

There are, however, a number of ways that we can, as the name implies, use software to manage our customer relationships. Danny Meyer, for example, talks about his use of OpenTable to do just that. There is, I think, a significant opportunity here to empower front-line library staff with the ability to personalize each transaction.

Love the good customer service story. I’d love to see this adapted for libraries — for the OPAC, but also for our databases and other e-resources. It would have to be EASY for patrons to do and for staff to evaluate.

At UConn, we’ve put a “report a problem” link in our OpenURL resolver menu and while it’s kind of hidden, we’ve gotten a number of emails reporting problems with links. We have a great email response system in place for eresources, so it was easy to add SFX problems to it. We give patrons great service — if they can’t get to the full-text of an article, we either find them the full-text & email it to them (if the link was bad) OR activate Interlibrary Loan for them (if the coverage dates were bad).

Sadly for our patrons, this is only a small part of how they interact with us, so it doesn’t resolve the majority of problems. But it shows that easy reporting for patrons + a good response system for staff = patron satisfaction.

At MPOW, I’m looking at leveraging an actual help-desk system for logging and following up on this sort of thing. CRM systems always seemed to be to be too focused on the $$, whereas I’m mostly concerned about the info directly.

The difficulty there is in selling the usefulness of the system to my Reference team.

Stephanie,

That’s a very ncie approach to the problem–at least for that small segment of your users that interact with you that way, as you say.

Hi John,

This makes me think of the great approach of Don Barlow at Westerville Public Library: he said in their staff meetings they always review the “No List” which is where they keep track of all the things the library has to say “no” to someone about. They ask “Why don’t we do this? Is that still the right answer? What would it take for us to say yes?” He told us they’ve found a lot of policies fossilized in stone which turned out to make no sense anymore and which they then changed. I think it’s a wonderful mindset.

Also if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend this session from last year’s SXSW Interactive: “Customer Service is the New Marketing” http://2007.sxsw.com/blogs/podcasts.php/2007/10/11/customer_service_is_the_new_marketing (moderated by Thor Muller of the now launched GetSatisfaction.com).

Dinah,

Wow, that’s a great podcast. I think it’s so true that there is a huge workforce dedicated to customer service but so little of it does it well. The Wii example is a perfect illustration of how empowering staff leads to better customer service.

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