June 2005

 

Welcome to the first issue of LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ News from the OLA. The purpose of this e-zine is twofold. One, it should keep you well informed regarding LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™, the Customer Satisfaction Management System created specifically for the Public Library sector by Counting Opinions, a Toronto-based Canadian company. Two, it should help to save you time; providing you with a resource for Customer Satisfaction Management, as well as relevant information to support your decision processes as you consider the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ service in your day-to-day operations.

Overtime this resource will continue to evolve to stay relevant to its changing reader-base. Anticipating that more Public Libraries will sign-on to the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ service, this information piece will attempt to share and keep you aware of potential opportunities to manage and improve the levels of satisfaction experienced by your customers at your Library. In particular, this medium will help share news, introduce new LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ service features, highlight best practices, discuss customer satisfaction issues, and link to other resources. Although it is unlikely that this will ever be an exhaustive resource, it will try to offer an immediate source of information that should, from time to time, stimulate ideas that you may not have yet considered.

I hope you will find this source of information both interesting and useful. If you have any comments or suggestions for the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ News, please do not hesitate to share these with me.

Ian Reid
Category Manager, LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™
Ontario Library Association

Counting Opinions to Develop LibSat French Language Equivalent

Counting Opinions recognizes the requirement to offer the choice between English and French for your customers to respond to the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Customer Satisfaction Survey in either of these languages. The company is preparing to have the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Survey translated into French and to verify and validate the French version in practice to ensure equivalency in response and comparability of results between the English and French language groups. This work is planned to commence at the end of April.

Exploring LibSat

To help give you a glimpse into the function, features, and potential of the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Customer Satisfaction Management System, Counting Opinions has created two presentations of the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ service. These presentations, although separate, are complimentary demonstrations of the "front-end" - the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Customer Satisfaction Survey - and the "back-end" - the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Customer Portal - including the reporting tools, articles, and what's new features of the service. Together these demonstrations impress how your customer provides their feedback and opinions on your services, and how you manage, interpret and respond to this valuable information gathered and stored in your customer satisfaction database. See Your Link Source below for the URL.

In future editions this section, Exploring LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™, will highlight other functions and features of the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ service to promote these and help subscribers to get the most out of the service.

Getting the Most out of LibSat

Perhaps the most daunting feature of LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ is its capability to reveal where there are areas of your Library’s service delivery that might need attention or improvement. LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ raises the “Red Flags” that identify the gaps in those services that your customers describe as important, but they have also indicated they are not highly satisfied with. If your customer describes a service as important but they are not satisfied with it, they may consider alternatives and other providers. They are the customer you might lose or they may eventually question the value of the Library's services in general. There is real value in knowing, therefore, where these customer satisfaction gaps are and identifying where to focus improvements - making the change from “Red Flag” to “Checkered Flag”.

In subsequent issues, this section will focus on the “Red Flags” with suggestions for reports to run using LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ to find these “Red Flags”, how to identify them, how to analyze them, and alternatives on how to respond to them - i.e. achieving Checkered Flags.

Don't forget that LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ also identifies those areas and services where your Library is already successful and achieving “Checkered Flags”. Use these successes to help hone in on your best practices, your strengths, and to possibly adapt these achievements to implement changes in those identified areas requiring improvement. Sharing your successes with your staff can also motivate them in striving to reach your other service delivery goals.

OLA Conducts Peer Review of LibSat

Recently the OLA conducted a peer-review of the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Customer Satisfaction Management System with the four LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ Public Library Reference Sites – Ajax, Barrie, Brampton, and Thunder Bay – to help share with you their experiences using LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ and to conduct an informal evaluation of the service on your behalf. The result is a Q&A document that asks the questions you would likely want to ask and offering a single answer to each question compiled from the responses given by the four reference sites. To ensure that the essence of their individual responses was not distorted or lost, each library was asked to review (and approve) the Q&A document.

Ajax, Barrie, Brampton, and Thunder Bay have become full subscribers to LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ and are also willing to answer any of your questions that you may have.