Kristen Higgason
Improving Customer Satisfaction in Libraries via the Library Employees
About
I chose this topic because as a future librarian, I know how important my patrons will be. Their satisfaction not only drives my passion, but will allows me to understand their needs better. Being able to understand what my patrons need from me and the library will allow me to ensure those things are done. I want to focus on how to measure their satisfaction, their perceptions, and how these two play into the role of the library and librarian. I want to focus on how the employees can use this information to provide better customer care and more meaningful interactions with the patrons of the libraries where they work. I chose to focus on a narrow aspect of the vast customer service studies that exist because most focus on the patron already but less on how the employees of the library can improve the satisfaction or their own satisfaction in their work when working with patrons. This bibliography will include studies about customer perceptions and how those can affect employees, how we can measure customer service and what to do with that information as employees, the role of libraries when it comes to customer service satisfaction, and of course, the perceptions and satisfaction of the employees.
Bibliography
Detlor, B., & Ball, K. (2015). Getting more value from the LibQUAL ® survey: the merits of
qualitative analysis and importance-satisfaction matrices in assessing library patron comments. College & Research Libraries,76(6), 796-810. doi:10.5860/crl.76.6.796
The authors of this study focused on how to get more value from LibQUAL+ Surveys to use in their libraries. The authors inspected the “…merit of conducting a qualitative analysis of LibQUAL+ survey comments” (Detlor & Ball, 2015, p.796). LibQUAL+ is an instrument administered by the Association of Research Librarians that is used quite often in the library world, and is used for customer satisfaction surveys in different types of libraries. The authors used a data set from McMaster University between Mar 4 and March 20, 2013 and analyzed comments that were collected from the survey. The authors found what their three response groups (faculty, graduate students, and graduate students) found most important and plotted them on an importance-satisfaction matrix which “…led to the identification of key recommendations to management” (Detlor & Ball, 2015, p. 805). This study can be used by employees to make quality surveys for their patrons which they can use to meet the needs of their patrons better. This study can also be used for the employees to create a better-equipped survey to pick up the satisfaction of themselves and to understand any weaknesses in the library and how to improve their own needs.
Hakala, U., & Nygrén, U. (2009). Customer satisfaction and the strategic role of university
libraries. International Journal of Consumer Studies,34(2), 204-211. doi:10.1111/j.1470-6431.2009.0083...
