Connecting Librarian

We all know about the various loyalty schemes run by the big chains, whether they are supermarkets, airlines, department stories, online sellers etc.  Even small coffee shops do coffee cards to encourage repeat patronage.

However, I came across the rewarding of customer loyalty in a different way recently, which got me thinking about this topic again.

We have a local set of shops close to home, mostly food related (I know its a hardship…. lol). I regularly visit the local Charcoal Chicken shop because they have great chips and salads.  Over time, because they are great people and because I understand what its like being on their side of the counter, I have developed a relationship with the staff that work there.  You can imagine my delight when they told me recently that I was their favourite customer (and not just because I bought lots of stuff there).

This customer loyalty has not just been rewarded by their friendship and the conversations we share, but in other ways.  I have been shouted lunch as a Christmas gift and I now get a discount on anything I buy from them (and as I said, that’s often because it is so good!).

That got me thinking about customer loyalty at the local level.  They are a single shop, so don’t have have the buying power of a chain behind them, so anything they do comes directly from their end profit.  So I really appreciate the discount, because I know what it costs them.

Now translate that to the library world.  We all have great regular customers who utilise our services and borrow our items weekly if not more often. I know of library users who are on our website and catalogue almost daily.  How can we reward those customers, encourage them to make even more use of the library and to also be our unheralded ambassadors to all they know?

One problem with this concept, especially in the bigger library where I work, is being able to identify these regulars.  We have so many staff, who work at different libraries, so we don’t always realise that the people we serve each day are loyal, regular users.  Sure we recognise some, but it wouldn’t been fair to offer a customer loyalty service to some and not others.  So how do we discover these people?

The next problem is what do we offer them? We don’t charge to place holds at our library, so we can’t offer free holds for them. We do charge fines, but are hoping to remove those in future, so even if we could discount fines for our regulars, it would only be a (hopefully) short term solution. We have unlimited loans on most item types, although we still have some limits on AV, so maybe there’s  potential there.

Some may say that our services and collections, being free, are reward enough. They are a reward in their own right, but my charcoal chicken place provides good quality food at a reasonable price and still give me a discount for loyalty (and being a nice person… ).

So the only things I have been able to come up with for our loyal, regular library users, have been discounted fines and increased AV limits.  Anything else that you can think of would be appreciated. These people are the lifeblood of our public library and deserve to be rewarded.  Please help me to figure out how we could do that.

And by the way, Happy New Year!

As promised, here is the update.  Its quick.  Check out the previous blog post for the details of what happened, and for Monique (Branch Managers) update in the comments.

The cleaners did a great job and the carpet was dry and library staff were able to put all the shelving back to its normal places by late Friday afternoon.

Children's area as it was and is again

Although there was close on 100 items affected by water, only about 12 had to be withdrawn, mostly magazines and humour which were on fixed shelving.  The rest of the affected books were dried out, the minor damage noted and returned to circulation.

Eighteen interior roofing tiles will be replaced, due to the water damage.  The cause was the amount of rain – it was too much, too quickly and the gutters and drainage just couldn’t cope.  Barring another such storm, it is not expected to happen again.

As of yesterday, the Council Offices were still drying out sections of their carpet affected by the flood.  The shopping centre mostly returned to normal operations by Monday just gone, although the cinema complex, where 9 out of the 10 cinemas were flooded, only reopened yesterday.  ( the noise of many wails heard from teenage girls not able to see New Moon locally, finally abated).

We were very fortunate in terms of where the flood hit us – it was not near electronic equipment and in the only part of the library where 90% of the collection was on wheels.  So between placement and fast acting staff, we got off very lightly.  Now its as if it never happened.

Business as usual.

It could have been a lot worse, but with so many people expressing their empathy, I thought I would take the time to blog the story of my library being flooded.  I will blog later about the implications further down the track.

Yesterday in Melbourne (Thursday 26th November), a severe thunderstorm came through, causing widespread damage across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.  I had seen the warnings via Twitter and had warned library staff, but we didn’t expect the impact that we got.

At about 3pm, the sky went so dark that our carpark lights came on automatically.  The area also went very still – trees stopped moving, as did many birds. At 3.05pm the wind started really moving and a few minutes later the rain came down. The best way I can describe it was cyclonic. I was watching from the staff room and it reminded a little of those TV reports you see live from cyclone affected areas.

The children's area at the time of recarpeting

Moments later, we heard the fuss out in the library and raced out to discover a waterfall running down from the roof, near the windows  in our children’s area – along a length of about 20 metres.  You can see the windows in the background of the picture here, this one taken at the time of recarpeting.

Fortunately, most of our children’s shelving is on wheels, so staff had quickly moved it out of harms way in just moments.  However, rain was still pouring outside and still waterfalling inside.  Every bucket and bin we could find was placed under the downpour, but it didn’t make much difference, the amount of water coming in was too great.

Fortunately, 10 minutes after the storm had begun – it stopped.  The storm front moved on and we began the process of assessing the damage and clearing up as best we could.  We dug around for equipment to help, finding a couple of mops, a stiff brush and a long armed window washer (which is great not only for windows, but only for squeezing water out of carpet tiles).

Calls were made to the Council and to our HQ for assistance and direction.  Unfortunately, due to the state of other Council buildings in the area, there was not much assistance available from Council, so we got to work ourselves.

We were concerned about the state of our roof tiles, especially after hearing the news of roof collapses in the nearby shopping centre, Council offices and swimming pool.  Ours held.

Flooding at Narre Warren Library

The clean up involved sopping up the extra water, which had spread close to our front desk, with the mops and using the brush and squeegee to push as much of it out the emergency exit as possible.  Once there was no longer a flood on top of the carpet tiles, the next job was to try and squeeze the excess water out of the sopping ones.  Fortunately, as we had only been recarpeted a year ago, the tiles were still relatively clean.  Still it meant, shoes off and pants rolled up – not the usual library staff look.

In the meantime, other staff were checking for other leaks (none fortunately) and removing stock which had been affected by the downfall.  Much of it just needed a quick wipe down, but even with the speedy response by staff, there was some stock damaged (I’d estimate up to 100 titles), so they took them out the staff area to remove the excess water and set them up to dry, in the hope of saving at least some of them.

Drying out water affected stock

The library did not close at any time during this whole affair and we were able to provide access to at least part of the childrens collections during that time.

After all that, a reassessment of the flooded area and some more judicious shelf rearranging, staff were able to reopen access to all of the children’s collections, whilst leaving the flooded areas and a good safety margin, roped off to all access.

When I left work at 6pm, the cleaners had arrived, with equipment to sop up even more water, before putting the blowers to work on drying out the tiles.

We were very lucky.  Even though it was a short storm, because of the leak’s  location and the quick action of staff, major damage was averted.

Will report more on the aftermath next week, when I know more about what we’ve lost in terms of collections and the condition of the roof.

Tesco Supermarket,Northampton UK

My local supermarket has just added an extension to its store and done some renovations to the rest of the store.  One of those renovations was to change the express checkout area, increasing it from 2 to 4 checkouts.  However, with the increase, came a change in how they were accessed.  The new system required you to line up at one of the open checkouts, which depending on time of day etc, was usually between 2 and 4.

However, this new process was not accepted with delight by either staff or customers.  The majority of people were well aware of the potential unfairness of the situation, in that you could be served slower if you happened to choose the wrong queue.  It happened fairly quickly that customers started going to back to a single queue, ignoring the signage and stepping up to be served as a checkout operator became available.

Staff, on behalf of the customers and the numerous comment they had already received, approached management about the issue, asking them to change it to a single queue, for fairer service.  The response was that such a change would cause unacceptable blockages of aisle space. (I don’t know if they were ignoring or were unaware that 4 queues were doing the same sort of thing anyway).

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.  I’m not privy to what happened behind closed doors, I just know what I gleaned from the girls behind the counter.  Anyway, those wonderful girls started taking a survey of customers, asking their opinion of the new setup and what their preference would be for the arrangement. From what I saw when they asked me the questions, the overwhelming response was that customers didn’t like the new setup and would prefer single queue access.

A few weeks later, I walk into the supermarket and there is now a barrier and guide, for one queue leading into the express checkout area.

Customer Service on Day 357

This hit me on so many levels. Firstly, the whole idea of fairness that both the staff and customers determined needed to be achieved.  Just reminded me that we live in a world with a vast majority of decent people and that moment I was happy to be a part of that larger community.

Second was that the supermarket staff knew their customers and were listening to what they were saying and tried to do something about it.  They took those concerns to management.  Unfortunately at that time, management weren’t listening.  So the staff went away and got the information they needed to support their claims for change.  I am both proud and amazed that someone would stand up for customer interests, which includes my own, like that. It may seem trivial, but it was important enough that staff took it to management, not once but twice.

Third was that management took note of this extra effort and the evidence they were given (even if it was on the second attempt) and took the action necessary to make both staff and customers happy.  I spoke to one staff after the change, who was both suprised, but also very pleased that they had listened and acted – very quickly once the decision was made.

So how does this translate to libraries?  Quite easily, as we are both about customer service.

Do we know our users well enough to know what they don’t like about our libraries or what they would like to happen in our libraries?  Is it more than just guessing at what we think they want? If we don’t know them well enough, why don’t we – we serve them every day?  Also if we don’t know, are we asking them and if not, why not?

If we know, are we telling our management and coming up with ideas for change?  If not, why not?  If we do tell and they don’t seem to be listening are we letting it go, giving lame excuses or are we going to find the information that will help change their minds? I know that there have been times that I have made those lame excuses, when instead I should be fighting for what I know our users want or don’t want. My local supermarket has taught me that it can work.

It can be trivial or it can be major.  But if we are not listening to our customers and what they want and doing what we can to provide it, then we are not really serving them, are we? I know I’ll be trying to do better in future and really keeping my ears and eyes open to what our users want, then communicating it to the people who can make the difference.

If you have any, I would love to hear your stories of where staff have won through to change things in your library, because it was what your users wanted.

After a delicious lunch out chatting with Darien’s team of librarian bloggers, I sat down with Barbara, Janet, Caitlin and Kim to talk about their podcasting efforts. They use an already bought Edirol MP3 Recorder (from Roland). They record, then do minimal processing of the file before uploading it to their website.

When recording a speaker, they put the recorder on a front row seat, next to someone monitoring it. For a concert, they place it next to a speaker and for an interview, on the table between the questioner and guest.

They use Wavepad (ironically its Australian) software, to compress the wmv file to MP3, Caitlin says it is much better than Audacity and its still free. They keep file sizes down to under 25 meg to keep it easier for up and downloading. If the session is longer than 20 minutes, they split it into separate files to keep it under the limit. Caitlin also uploads their podcasts to iTunes as well as having them available through their events blog. They have done podcasts on how to podcast, responses to the question of who will die in Harry Potter, teen book reviews, concert, speakers and more.

Caitlin also does audio reviews of audio books for Audiofile magazine, which helps her stay current on podcasting techniques and equipment. Darien also has a MySpace page and although they haven’t done much with it, they have over 100 friends – mostly publishers and librarians however.

I finished the day with Alan Kirk Gray – an amazing and delightful gentleman. We talked about the new Darien Library and all the changes that will come with the new building. Some of these changes include roving reference, RFID with no set circulation desk, a learning commons in the basement, teen center next to the computer, SOHO – small office, home office space, virtual reference office and much more. Its all very exciting and a lot of risk taking, so it will be amazing and exciting to watch how it all develops. They are aiming to be collaborative, with patron to staff and patron to patron.

Darien is very customer focused – what I experienced as a visitor is also the type of experience that every user enjoys. Alan and the entire Darien staff were a pleasure to deal with and I felt like a treasured guest as that was how I was treated. I can’t thank Louise, Alan and the Darien staff enough for sharing their experiences and the journeys involved with me.