Description

In this lecture delivered to working librarians, importance of service management to librarianship in general and service quality and customer satisfaction in particular are analysed and explained with illustrations. Identification of quality in ‘goods’ is compared to that in ‘service’ to show the difficulties in assessing the quality of services. The talk enumerates various characteristics of service and not-for-profit (NFP) organizations. The concepts ‘customer’, ‘customer focus’, ‘customer satisfaction’ and ‘user information satisfaction’ are explained and discussed. Also presented are the ways of measuring customer satisfaction, a service quality model with five gaps between aspirations and performance. Also explained diagrammatically is the quality evaluation process. The slides discuss several factors affecting customer satisfaction and identifies different satisfaction levels. Identifying reasons for customer dissatisfaction and why they quit are presented form the results of surveys. The other aspects of presentation include what one can learn from dissatisfied customers, how to make customer happy, how to handle difficult customers, etc. as part of customer management. Lastly, some ISO measures of performance, dimensions of service quality in LIS to bring effectiveness to library and information services together with tips for better service quality and steps to improve service quality are enumerated.