Customer service excellence

Libraries, publishers and subscription agents all seek to improve communication in the information chain. Discussion lists play an important role in the communication between libraries and publishers. However, there are still ongoing issues – libraries often publicly berate publishers for their lack of clarity in communication, but what do publishers think of libraries? Can libraries do more to help publishers improve communication? Are the subscription agents doing enough in the middle to get the information out there? This is intended as a no-holds-barred workshop, covering all publishers and libraries. The presenters hope to come out of the workshops with a clear list of improvements that can be made to make the communication process much more effective

Techniques for Providing Outstanding Customer Service

Providing exceptional customer service should be one of the primary goals for all academic libraries. However, with the day- to- day interruptions, librarians sometimes forget all about customer service. By developing a Customer Service Task Force, Penfield Library has been able to develop a number of projects in the past two years to greatly improve its reputation. Such methods as surveys and small and large focus groups were conducted to determine what projects needed to be addressed. Tips and tricks to providing quality customer service in a small college/university library are also presented

Techniques for Providing Outstanding Customer Service

Providing exceptional customer service should be one of the primary goals for all academic libraries. However, with the day- to- day interruptions, librarians sometimes forget all about customer service. By developing a Customer Service Task Force, Penfield Library has been able to develop a number of projects in the past two years to greatly improve its reputation. Such methods as surveys and small and large focus groups were conducted to determine what projects needed to be addressed. Tips and tricks to providing quality customer service in a small college/university library are also presented

Customers Suffer From Employee Churn: High Turnover Makes It Harder to Provide Top Service

Key Findings: • As rates of voluntary turnover climb within key business units, customers are more likely to report bad customer service. • When new workers arrive, established workers have to take time away from customer service to train the new workers in procedures and company culture. • Work units with lots of new employees have more trouble managing turnover and receive the lowest customer service ratings. • Bigger may not be better—larger work units have particular difficulty managing turnover and receive lower customer service scores than smaller ones. • A tight, cohesive work group seems to suffer from turnover as much as a less-bonded group

"How May I Help You?": Modeling Twitter Customer Service Conversations Using Fine-Grained Dialogue Acts

Given the increasing popularity of customer service dialogue on Twitter, analysis of conversation data is essential to understand trends in customer and agent behavior for the purpose of automating customer service interactions. In this work, we develop a novel taxonomy of fine-grained "dialogue acts" frequently observed in customer service, showcasing acts that are more suited to the domain than the more generic existing taxonomies. Using a sequential SVM-HMM model, we model conversation flow, predicting the dialogue act of a given turn in real-time. We characterize differences between customer and agent behavior in Twitter customer service conversations, and investigate the effect of testing our system on different customer service industries. Finally, we use a data-driven approach to predict important conversation outcomes: customer satisfaction, customer frustration, and overall problem resolution. We show that the type and location of certain dialogue acts in a conversation have a significant effect on the probability of desirable and undesirable outcomes, and present actionable rules based on our findings. The patterns and rules we derive can be used as guidelines for outcome-driven automated customer service platforms.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, IUI 201

Customer service : giving your best

This is a report on the presentation "Customer service: giving your best" that took place at the Saskatchewan Library Association/Saskatchewan Association of Library Trustees Conference, North Battleford, SK, April 25-28, 1996. This session was given by Val Solash from Edmonton Public Library and was designed to help make librarians better customer service providers. Tips included realizing that that everyone in an organization has customers ("inside" and "outside" customers) and that customers have "moments of truth" when they come into contact with any aspect of the organization. In addition, a Total Product Concept model for customer service was presented, which describes "core", "expected", and "exceeded" services

Customer service excellence II

In last year’s workshop discussion centred on the problems in the communication chain between publishers and librarians and what could be done to eliminate them. One year on, the presenters will share the results of their latest survey on customer service – have we moved on, or are the issues still the same? In addition the workshop will develop the idea of Charter Mark as a way to improve quality. As more and more university libraries adopt Charter Mark, is it time for publishers and intermediaries to make performance standards publicly available? Can we agree on them and will this make the communication process even more effective

Psychological Contracts, OCB and Customer Service: An Exploratory Examination

This paper examines the relationships among the psychological contract, fairness, OCB, and customer service. We report on two exploratory studies that provide insight into psychological contract violations and subsequent perceptions of fairness, as well as OCB activity. A linkage is made between psychological contracts and behavior directed internally and those directed externally (i.e., customer service). We extend the current theory to suggest implications for effectively managing customer service employee OCB. Finally, suggestions are made for both practice and future research to be conducted in a multidisciplinary design

Maintaining customer service in a fast food outlet

In a fast food outlet, a competitive field, customer service is a crucial factor. Customers are very much concerned about customer service and the quality of the food they get. This research is based on quality of service, inventory management, and employee training methods. Qualitative method is used for data collection for this project since it is more communicative and reliable. Data is collected from observations during work time. The store manager was interviewed for more information about inventory management of the store and customer service. This research found that not all the employees are trained for customer service. The inventory is done manually in the store, which is a time-consuming method. Not keeping sufficient stock leads to a shortage of toppings for pizza in the rush time if demand goes high, which may lead to customer complaints. Results of this research show that the standard of customer service and quality of food can be controlled and improved by managing the inventory, employee retention technique, and proper employee training. The research recommends using employee retention techniques and software methods for better inventory management. Keeping safe stocks as per the demand can reduce customer complaints about the quality of food.