Former Circulation Clerk and Library Director Victoria Ashford took over a “good” library with a vision to make it great. She believes she has a system, a formula, a plan, to do this for libraries. With an annual operating budget of around $250,000, she was running a small library with big ideas. She looked at it with the perspective that they may be small, but they were scrappy!

Customer service for Victoria is valuing your customer and making them feel important. Her scope of “customer” is broad. Customers include both “internal” and “external” customers who have a present and future interest in your organization and who you consistently value and deem important through attitude or actions. Internal includes staff, volunteers, board members and elected officials. External includes patrons, other libraries, other city departments, vendors – anybody who is “external” to the organization.

Her secret formula for sensational customer service? P³ & C³ = SCS

The formula incorporates the following:

Presentation: how you look. This covers staff, furniture, anything with an appearance.

Personality. What would your customers say about you if they could describe you in three words or less? Part of your personality is knowing your role – who you want to be. Victoria wanted her library to be a community center, robust and full of life and energy.

Programming. What you do and/or provide. Victoria found libraries say “no” a lot. So she started saying yes. One of her first steps was to make reference circulating. When items weren’t allowed out of the building, they wound up disappearing. When people were allowed to check items out, these items would come back. There was usage.

Care answers the customer’s question, “Who am I to you?” Some examples of “wonder working words” that show that you care: “I’m sorry,” “will you while I?” and “I was wrong.” After every interaction and meeting one way to show care is to solicit questions, comments or concerns, or as Victoria says, QCC. Don’t assume everything is clear. This opens up the communication for knowledge sharing.

Weeding isn’t just for books. A few rules to remember:

• Show great love to the happy.
• Show diligent action to the unhappy.
• Show the door to the perpetually unhappy or harmful.

This kind of action happens everyday in restaurants, bars and other environments. These actions show that you care about your internal and external customer.

Connection. How we feel together, or the relationships. We spend a lot of time thinking about our relationship to the public, but we shouldn’t have two sets of behaviors between the public and our peers.

Customization. How are you unique? What is your brand? If you can’t get more staff or money, what can you do to attract people to your library? One way is by distinguishing your collections from other libraries, or perhaps by serving a special or discarded population.

In the end it’s all about delighting the customer. Use technology to your advantage to say you care, and dip into your own pocket if you have to.

And remember, you may not have to hear praise or words of encouragement for doing your job, but someone on your staff may take those words and see that you care.