A top library consultant offers specific recommendations for helping libraries adapt to their changing role in the community. What is the future of the public library? How can libraries embrace the forces of change and provide the resources—and the resource-gathering environment—today's patrons want? The Customer-Focused Library: Re-Inventing the Library From the Outside-In answers these questions by proposing a transformative alternative, a reimagined library in which the collections, the services—even the building itself—are designed and built from the customer's perspective. Written by one of the country's foremost library consultants, The Customer-Focused Library shows how perceived threats to the traditional library model are in fact exciting opportunities for change. The book lays out the steps by which professionals and patrons together can help invent a new generation of libraries, with discussions of hiring guidelines, merchandizing, the library website, even the building plan itself. It is a proactive, consumer-based approach aimed at helping librarians focus on underexamined ideas, underexploited trends, underused assets, and the as-yet unvoiced needs of library consumers.
In this book, the author attacks these and other pressing issues facing today's academic librarians. Her trailbrazing strategies centre on keeping the customer's point of view in focus at all times to help you to integrate technology to meet today's student and faculty needs.
As libraries move into the 21st century, quality management has become a key focus of the effort to create a service culture that meets - and indeed exceeds - customer requirements. The language of customer service has become common in the library and information sector, as have many of the techniques associated with the provision of customer-focused services. However, there is a danger that customer service may be seen as a 'bolt on' to existing core provision in the form of feedback mechanisms, information leaflets and customer-training sessions. One of the challenges facing managers is to go beyond the acknowledgement of the importance of a customer focus, and to develop an understanding of how this focus can be embedded in the culture of their services via strategic and operational management. This new management guide addresses this challenge. Contributed by LIS professionals with extensive experience in the management of public and academic services, each chapter presents a good practice guide to an element of strategic or operational management with the customer placed at centre stage: the users' perspective; planning and policy making; leadership and management; human resource planning; marketing as a tool for LIS managers; assuring quality; planning buildings for customers and services; developing a service culture through partnerships; virtual service. Readership: This book is essential reading for managers of library and information services from senior to team managers, and also for all those involved in devising strategy and policy for staff and service development. It is relevant to libraries and information services in any area of the world.
In this book the author brings together distinctive and cutting edge work based upon her own research and work with leading companies in the overlapping areas of strategy, marketing and innovation to provide a new and dynamic model to implement customer focus in enterprizes. In an environment of falling margins the model shows how to increase value to customers and improve business results.
This extensively revised and updated edition explores even further the ways technology influences both the experiences of library customers and the ways libraries themselves can assess those experiences.
In this book, nine librarians from across the country describe their libraries’ best practices in this key area. Their contributions range from all-encompassing customer service policies and models any library can both adapt and be proud of to micro-approaches that emphasize offering excellent user-focused technology planning, picture book arrangement with patrons in mind, Web 2.0 tools to connect users with the library, establishing good service delivery chains, and making your library fantastic for homeschoolers. As past Public Library Association President Audra Caplan writes in her introduction to this book, “There is nothing magical about providing excellent customer service; it just takes the right people, the right philosophy and the passion to make it a reality.” If you’ve got all that, here are the best practices to make stellar customer service a reality for your library’s users.
Lays out the steps by which professionals and patrons can work together to invent a new generation of libraries, with discussions of hiring guidelines, merchandising, the library website, and even the building plan itself.
DRIVE SUSTAINABILITY AND GROWTH WITH A PROCESS FOCUSED ENTERPRISE You can execute a world-class business improvement plan, but if its effects don't reach the customer--is it really of value? In this groundbreaking book, business innovation expert David Hamme reveals a powerful and proven method for connecting your company’s valuecreation processes to customer-desired products--forging a direct link between strategic intentions and everyday business activities. The goal is to systematize innovation in your company--and Customer Focused Process Innovation takes you step-by-step through the details to accomplish this goal. With Hamme as your guide, you'll transform your organization into a Process Focused Enterprise--one in which organizational silos, command-andcontrol management, guesswork, and information inadequacies cease to exist--and where intuitive, simplified, fact-based, customer-connected, efficient approaches are the rule, not the exception. Customer Focused Process Innovation shows you how to: Assess your current operational capabilities by visually depicting work streams and building a conceptual blueprint from your core value chain to the end consumer Drive customer-focused improvements by building rich feedback loops from the front lines and by actively managing the customer's processes Implement a powerful new system that embeds process management practices to ensure every process delivers the greatest financial benefit “When designed, managed, and utilized correctly, business processes are the foundational framework for innovation,” Hamme writes. You don't have to hope that innovation will just happen. You now have the knowledge, insight, and tools to drive it. With Customer Focused Process Innovation you have everything you need to revamp your processes to innovate, grow, and outpace the competition. PRAISE FOR CUSTOMER FOCUSED PROCESS INNOVATION: "Hamme's approach is not a pie-in-the-sky set of big ideas, but rather an expertly woven and intuitively practical framework of concepts and tools that bridge the gap between visions and strategies." -- Steve Jegier, Head of Strategy, Wealth, Brokerage, and Retirement, Wells Fargo "Hamme's emphasis on using a process focus and initiative management to drive long-term, real improvement to an organization is spot on. It's the only way to really bring about the adaptation needed to survive." -- Richard Maltsbarger, Business Development Executive, Lowe's Companies, Inc. "Finally a business book that not only provides great thought-provoking insight into how a business operates, but also gives the step-by-step instructions to create a blueprint that everyone in the organization can follow to take the guesswork out of execution." -- Don Smith, VP of Marketing, Family Dollar Stores "Having a 'great idea' is easy--driving it to execution is the hard part. We all talk about it, and now David has it documented." -- Caroline M. Kolman, P.E., Managing Director, Prism Healthcare Partners LTD "Ninety-nine percent of the innovation books published don't address the part of the process where ninety-nine percent of the value is created: implementation. However, David addresses this complex issue head on. If you want to make innovation a reality, get this book." -- Stephen M. Shapiro, author, Best Practices Are Stupid
Librarians are now faced with marketing to a generation of students who log on rather than walk in and this cutting-edge book supplies the tools needed to keep customers coming through the door.
