UKlibchat

Last night for the first time in ages I managed to catch #uklibchat, usually I join #chartershipchat, as I have just submitted my chartership, but I fancied a change. Uklibchat is a twitter conversation between library professionals, we met roughly once a month. Last nights session was really good. We discussed the definition of users, who are the users. For me it's a closed group, the staff and students that are at the college. An easy one to start with.

Customer service and barriers to delivering this. Coming from a retail background customer service is back ending a shift exhausted having helping everyone else. Maybe that is a bit extreme, but customer service is about putting the customer first, stopping that conversation and dealing with the customer. Personally I hate to ask where something else in a shop and if I then get a rude person telling me I am likely not to bother buying the product. Good customer care is shared, you normally tell someone about it. Working in education where students have to pay a massive amount to attend, someone recently told me students are paying £35 per day to attend, so give them what they deserve.

Barriers to providing good customer care- staff personality, work load and not being able to give students what they want due to budget or conflicting strategy plans of the department. I have to say reading success at the enquiry desk by Tim Owen, dated by very good for training sessions.  I must have used this book twice, maybe three sessions.

Online users experience, a decent website needs to have the content written by the librarian, a web designer to make everything pretty and a web developer to make it actually work. Technology not working, due to IT issues is one of my biggest problems when teaching students. Luckily I have a decent relationship with the IT department and they are use to no body ever saying something works well.