Last night I dined at the bar of a run-of-the-mill chain restaurant. On the road for business this is my usual modus operandi, with the variant of dining in the hotel bar instead. You get the picture.
So my bartender in this instance turns out to be flat out awesome. She’s there when I want her and not when I don’t. A simple signal while I’m on a long phone call with my wife answers any question. She’s attentive but not hovering. She knows which questions to ask and when, and also when to stay away. She even recognizes me from previous visits, often a year apart. She gives, in other words, astonishing service. Believe me, I know it when I see it.
At this little chain restaurant in a town that most people have never heard of, I was getting the kind of service that I’ve received at some of the most expensive restaurants in Sonoma, Napa, Chicago, New York, Paris, San Francisco — you name it. And often (sadly) better.
The point is this: great service is not always tied to the money being paid for that service. I agree that if you are paying top dollar at an expensive restaurant you expect excellent service. But the converse is not true: that you will necessarily receive poor service at a much less expensive restaurant. This is because service has more to do with the individual providing the service than it does with anything else.
Sure, good training can be key. But some servers learn on the job and intuitively understand what great service means. And libraries are no different. Individuals can be given the tools they need to provide excellent customer service regardless of the monetary resources at hand.
Great service, I assert, can be boiled down to a few principles that can be employed in any organization that attempts to provide it:
These are just some of the strategies that occur to me in developing astonishing public service. Feel free to share your thoughts in a comment below. Libraries are nothing if not public service organizations, so getting this really right is essential to our success.