September 2006

 

Welcome to the first North American edition of LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service News produced and distributed by Counting Opinions. This ezine is dedicated to the betterment of Public Library customer satisfaction. LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service News would like to welcome the following new users of LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service:

• County of Los Angeles;
• Indianapolis Marion County;
• Kansas City;
• Leduc;
• Ottawa;
• Springfield-Greene County; and,
• St. Charles City-County.

In this issue:

Being Satisfied With Having Satisfied Customers (Patrons)… is NOT Good Enough!

Your LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service results are telling you the majority of your customers are satisfied, but can and should you do more? - Yes.

Community Needs to Your Financial Needs to Your Staff's Needs - LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Empowers Public Libraries

Listening to your customers can reveal and support an array of opportunities for improvements within your Library.

Continuous Customer Feedback

A Prescription for Greater Customer Insight

A measured approach supporting regular and continuous feedback from your customers can produce an information rich database for conducting inter-temporal comparisons and tracking the impacts of changes and events at your Library.

How do you compare? Try the NEW Comparison Reports

Saving you time and effort, LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service now includes a "pre-built" comparison reporting tool for month to month, branch to branch, and LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Subscriber to All LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Subscriber comparisons.

LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service™ Set to Start Beta Testing Very Soon

Counting Opinions has developed a new performance assessment system for libraries that will provide libraries a comprehensive database for the collection, analysis, reporting and eventual submission of library key performance indicators. Testing is to begin soon.

Please read on to find out more.

I hope you will find this issue of LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service™ News both interesting and informative. If you have any suggestions for future issues, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you for your readership.

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

Being Satisfied with Having Satisfied Customers (Patrons)

…is NOT Good Enough!

Most managers rejoice if the majority of customers that respond to customer-satisfaction surveys say they are satisfied. But some of those managers may have a big problem. When most customers are saying they are satisfied but not completely satisfied, they are saying that they are unhappy with some aspect of the product or service. And, if they have the opportunity, they will defect.

Organizations that excel in satisfying customers excel both in listening to customers and in interpreting what customers with different levels of satisfaction are telling them. This 1995 Jones and Sasser effort as published in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) continues to be one of the most seminal efforts on this vital subject.

The entire article can be downloaded from HBR (a download fee applies). http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=95606

Community Needs to Your Financial Needs to Your Staff Needs

LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service presents subscribers with several opportunities to learn and understand the needs of public library customers.

LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service facilitates understanding of the broader needs of your general community. The comprehensive design of the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service questionnaires gives you an insightful overview of your customers' needs. Complimented by other information sources, LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service gives you customer knowledge and the ability to derive and in-turn implement the recommendations that your customers have driven. Subsequently, as you continue to gather information, it is possible to test the impact of change and to further refine the delivery of your services to meet the needs of the community.

Justifying funding requests and budget allocations is much easier with strong data in support of these proposals. LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service gives you the support of your customers, their opinions and their comments, regarding what services they value most. There is no more powerful advocate of the services you provide than those who use them.

Your staff can also benefit from LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service. Your customers can raise issues regarding staff interactions that perhaps you were unaware of and having this brought to your attention, you can respond accordingly. Customers also provide compliments and thanks to the staff. The positive opinions and comments can be a source of motivation and satisfaction knowing their service is appreciated.

To learn more, please contact Ian Reid.

Continuous Customer Feedback – A Prescription for Greater Customer Insight

Q. How do you eat an elephant?

A. One bite at a time.

What does eating an elephant have to do with delivering a continuous Public Library Customer Satisfaction Survey? Not a lot, but both can seem daunting tasks at first. The idea that needs to be grasped is that having the correct approach can achieve the desired outcomes. By having daily (bite-sized) targets for the number of customer responses to your survey, it is possible to build a significant database of customer satisfaction information over time without feeling the overwhelming need to have every customer respond in the initial weeks of implementing LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service.

Since LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service is a continuous customer satisfaction survey, the data gathered can reflect seasonal variations and will provide more meaningful information throughout an extended period of time compared to a point-in-time (snapshot) survey. Your plan to gather data, therefore needs to reflect and support a continuous process. As result, your customers will become an integral part of the development and improvement of your service delivery.

Your strategy should be to develop your customer satisfaction database over the duration of your LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service subscription, and, when possible, to pursue opportunities to generate more responses; the result being a richer database. This is an effective approach for building your customer satisfaction database. Having regular responses each day, week and month offers the ability to do period comparisons, conduct trend analysis, and to track the impact of events and changes at the library.

LibPAS Set to Start Beta Testing

LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service continuously gathers customer satisfaction data enabling public libraries to benchmark their quality of service on a day-to-day, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis and conduct comparisons between any two periods of time.

Right now, LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Subscribers can internally benchmark their locations against each branch in their system or externally against the aggregate customer satisfaction data from all LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Subscribers. Counting Opinions is working to extend this feature to enable benchmarking of the services provided by one library against those provided by another with a view to sharing "best practices".

The challenge, however, has been to determine a basis for comparison when benchmarking one Library against another. This is where Performance Indicator (PIPerformance Indicator(s), also Data Element(s)) data can help. By combining quantitative PIsPerformance Indicator(s), also Data Element(s) with qualitative LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Survey questions, you create the basis for meaningful comparison.

Examples of PIPerformance Indicator(s), also Data Element(s) data includes situational and operational components such as population served, active card holders, library square footage, collection size, staff head count, hours of operation, etc. While this comparative data is available from various sources, it is not currently accessible and available to be combined online with existing LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Data. As a result it has been Counting Opinions' worry that there would be an amount of extra effort required by LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service Subscribers to input and maintain the additional information.

So how do you bridge the gap and create the means to conduct comparative analysis and benchmarking without imposing an added work requirement on each Library system?

The answer is LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service™.

LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service is a Library Performance Assessment System designed to enable Public Libraries to achieve greater efficiency in collecting, rolling-up and reporting data to stakeholders such as the Provincial and Territorial Governments and other organizations who gather this type of information.

Some of the data that you collect and submit to each organization is similar, but you are still required to separately collect, tabulate and submit this data. Additionally, accessing the final results for the collected PIPerformance Indicator(s), also Data Element(s) data requires a waiting period from several months to several years, thus significantly lowering the value to the Library. And finally, combining the results from these separate collections, or performing benchmark analysis, is essentially impractical for any one library to consider.

LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service provides a secure interface enabling Library Systems to enter each PIPerformance Indicator(s), also Data Element(s) data element only once for each reporting period. LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service automatically tabulates (rolls-up) branch level results and calculates key ratios based on the data entered. The result is a significant savings in time and effort typically required to prepare and submit this type of data to several independent stakeholders. But the real value of LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service is the ability to access the results immediately, online and in real-time. This enables Libraries to conduct benchmarking as and when the information is posted by each Library.

If your Library is interested in participating as a LibPASLibrary Performance Assessment Service beta test site, please do not hesitate to contact Ian Reid.

New Comparison Reports

Having listened to the needs of the subscriber, LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service now includes a new comparisons reporting section as part of the "pre-built" reporting features of the service. The comparison reports give LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service subscribers a quick and easy to use tool to set up and run location comparison and month-to-month comparison reports.

Like the other existing "pre-built" summary reports, which require only a few simple selections before running the reports, these comparison reports will save time and effort for those LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service subscribers that have not yet created similar reports as part of their customized list of reports. These reports also provide quick and meaningful information which can also be downloaded to a spreadsheet application.

Perhaps one of the best indicators of overall library performance is to perform a comparison of results and to gauge where a library stands amongst its peers. To help LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service users to achieve this greater insight and understanding, the comparison reporting tools also provide the option of comparing results to the overall aggregate results of all the LibSatLibrary Customer Satisfaction Management Service subscribers. All aggregate data remains non-attributable.