Measuring Customer Service Effectiveness

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "Measuring Customer Service Effectiveness", The Electronic Library, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 251-252. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470510592988

Most library managers, curators, and archivists believe that their organisation provides good customer service, but without ever trying to ascertain whether that is true or not. Because customer service is intangible it cannot be measured with simple counts, such as the circulation numbers that suffice to demonstrate the business activity of a library. Perhaps because it has been perceived as unnecessary – the manager assumes the service is good – or because the necessary measures are considered time consuming and even unsatisfactory, the quality of customer service in libraries and similar organisations has rarely been dealt with adequately.

Cook's book would service as an introduction to measuring service quality. It covers the field well. There is a chapter on qualitative methods that discusses focus groups and one‐to‐one interviews. There is possibly sufficient detail on focus groups to get a manager started with this technique, but, as with most other methods described in this book, it is more of an introduction to show the benefits of each method rather than a manual to show you how to do it in practice. I liked the suggestions for video or web‐based focus groups. The chapter on quantitative methods covers postal and e‐mail questionnaires/surveys, telephone surveys, structured interviews, comments cards and customer complaints, mystery shopping, and simple observation. Again, the material here would be useful for a library manager who has little prior knowledge of service quality measurement techniques, for they would be able to form opinions about the value of each, and how and when to use the methods. What I doubt they would be able to do, though, is actually carry out a survey or a mystery shop using only this book. Having just written one article on telephone surveys, and one on mystery shopping, and finding it hard to keep either one down to 5,000 words, I can understand how Cook could not provide sufficient information for this to be a manual, but it is not actually clear that the author and publisher see it that way. At times there is a lot of detail, for example, on using scales in questionnaires, but at other times, when dealing with gap analysis, for example, the content is much too light.

There is a chapter on measuring internal service quality, and one chapter on benchmarking. Both are worthwhile. Rather too many libraries conduct performance appraisal but do not ask staff for their ideas on improving customer service. Benchmarking is usually done to compare simple input and output figures, but rarely to compare good customer service practices. The whole of the book stays in touch with the general needs of management to deliver value for money, and in reverse, what management must provide in terms of leadership.

If you are new to measuring customer service then this is a decent place to start. I would suggest, though, that something with more detail in it, such as Hernon and Whitman's (2001) Delivering Satisfaction and Service Quality: A Customer‐based Approach for Libraries would be more useful.