Stellar Customer Service
Training Library Staff to Exceed Expectations
by Mou Chakraborty, Editor
August 2016, 213pp, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
1 volume, Libraries Unlimited

Paperback: 978-1-4408-4076-0
$60, £47, 53€, A83
eBook Available: 978-1-4408-4077-7
Please contact your preferred eBook vendor for pricing.

Outstanding customer service will bring people back to your library, but exceeding library users’ needs isn’t easy—and your staff need to be specifically taught how to do so. Get the practical advice and models for staff training you need to make your academic, public, or specialty library more successful.

From librarians to volunteer workers, staff to student workers, all library personnel need to deliver great customer service. This book presents innovative instructional methods that will inspire you to take a fresh approach to customer service training.

Customer service is one of the most critical staff development training areas in the library world. Every member of a library’s staff who interacts with the public needs the specialized skills and tools to work with a diverse clientele. This book addresses the need for staff training for various kinds of libraries, covering public and academic libraries of various sizes, medical libraries, law libraries, and state organization and joint-use libraries.

Each chapter of Stellar Customer Service: Training Library Staff to Exceed provides practical advice and creative solutions for showing staff how to handle customer service issues. The book identifies the essential skills and tools staff at all levels—from librarians and staff to student workers and volunteers—must have to contribute to your library’s success. Readers will learn innovative training methods, see how a wide range of libraries have approached this perennial staff issue, and get excited about approaching their own customer service training in fresh new ways.

Features

  • Provides model staff training programs that have been proven successful in real-world applications
  • Addresses how to improve the delivery of customer service at all levels of personnel—librarians, general staff, student workers, and volunteers
  • Includes guidelines on re-training and evaluation of customer service training needs
Mou Chakraborty, MLIS, is director of public services at Blackwell Library, Salisbury University, where she supervises the Access Services and the Research & Instructional Services departments. She is also the coordinator for distance library services. Her prior positions included special collections/reference librarian at University of Maryland Eastern Shore, distance and instructional technology librarian at Nova Southeastern University, and medical librarian positions in Boston and Missouri. An active member in multiple library associations, she has presented at several conferences nationally and regionally; recently, she has conducted interactive workshops on customer service for various libraries throughout Maryland. Chakraborty holds a master's degree in English from University of Calcutta, India, and a master's degree in library and information science from University of Missouri-Columbia.

Reviews

"[R]esourceful, well-researched, and implementable. . . This is highly recommended to any library interested in revising their customer services practices to best serve their community."—VOYA, December 6, 2016

"Library administrators and managers as well as library staff working in public services will benefit from reading this book. They will find this resource particularly useful in developing, revitalizing and/or assessing a customer service model and training program."—Technical Services Quarterly, January 1, 2018
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