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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.