Good customers expect excellent service. Increasingly, library customers are looking to online services instead of to the library for information. For every library that wants to win satisfied customers and bring those that have strayed back into the library, here are proven tools to assess needs and improve service.

Excellence in customer service is the hallmark of success in service industries and among manufacturers of products that require reliable service. But what exactly is excellent service? It is the ability to deliver what you promise, say the authors, but first you must determine what you can promise. Building on seven years of research on service quality, they construct a model that, by balancing a customer's perceptions of the value of a particular service with the customer's need for that service, provides brilliant theoretical insight into customer expectations and service delivery. For example, Florida Power & Light has developed a sophisticated, computer-based lightening tracking system to anticipate where weather-related service interruptions might occur and strategically position crews at these locations to quicken recovery response time. Offering a service that customers expect to be available at all times and that they will miss only when the lights go out, FPL focuses its energies on matching customer perceptions with potential need. Deluxe Corporation, America's highly successful check printer, regularly exceeds its customers' expectations by shipping nearly 95% of all orders by the day after the orders were received. Deluxe even put U.S. Postal Service stations inside its plants to speed up delivery time. Customer expectations change over time. To anticipate these changes, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company regularly monitors the expectations and perceptions of their customers, using focus group interviews and the authors' 22-item generic SERVQUAL questionnaire, which is customized by adding questions covering specific aspects of service they wish to track. The authors' groundbreaking model, which tracks the five attributes of quality service -- reliability, empathy, assurance, responsiveness, and tangibles -- goes right to the heart of the tendency to overpromise. By comparing customer perceptions with expectations, the model provides marketing managers with a two-part measure of perceived quality that, for the first time, enables them to segment a market into groups with different service expectations.

In this book leading scholars and practitioners present the latest research and theory in customer satisfaction and services marketing with a wealth of stimulating ideas. Topics discussed include: the measurement of the managerial impact on service quality improvement; new methods of assessing the various elements of service quality; and philosophies of the nature of customer value. The diverse viewpoints of the contributors reveal the variety of emerging ideas on the subject of service quality.

Customer Service Delivery taps into business, marketing, and psychological research and practices to provide a wealth of knowledge about customer service. With contributions from some of the best-known industrial and organizational psychology experts in customer service, this book brings together in one comprehensive resource a review of the best practices in customer service delivery. Customer Service Delivery also provides a framework for customer service as a process and an outcome. The authors address a wide range of topics that are crucial to today’s competitive business environment: customer expectations, loyalty satisfaction, product versus service delivery, measurement, brand equity, regional and cultural differences, and organizational impact. Customer Service Delivery explores human resource staffing practices and service delivery by including proven selection strategies for hiring top quality service workers, an analysis of the personality correlates of service performance, and a comprehensive review of assessment instruments that predict customer service performance. In addition, this important resource contains strategies and tactics to improve and manage service delivery and offers illustrative case examples of how organizations have successfully improved and managed customer service.

You've heard the buzzwords: service quality; quality improvement; customer satisfaction. You've seen the techniques: fishbone diagrams; flow charts; brainstorming. Never before have so many service quality and customer satisfaction techniques been gathered, efficiently organized, and clearly presented in a single volume. This unique guide takes you through the maze of measurement tools, explaining each with clarity using exhibits and examples. Parts I and II give an overview of what service quality is and how standard measurement techniques can actually mislead if used incorrectly. In Part III, Chakrapani uses his "P3D3" matrix to explain which tool works best for different measurement needs. Part IV describes how to measure customer satisfaction, and Parts V and VI tie it all together with a discussion of developing a philosophy of quality and an overview of how to apply the right tools to different measurement problems. This book is an excellent introduction to those who are new in the field, as well as an indispensable reference for veterans in service quality and customer satisfaction.

If you don't offer great customer experience, your main competitors will take away 50% of your business. Period. Gone are the days in which businesses could simply offer an "OK" experience and get away with it. In today's hypercompetitive environment, companies can no longer be just B2C or B2B. They must become B2Me - more personal, more relevant. With customers having higher expectations and access to more information than ever before, companies must create stellar, frictionless, personalized, and memorable customer experiences, if they plan to stay in the game. In this book, you will learn: - What customer experience truly is. - How emotions can increase customer loyalty...or make customers ditch a brand. - Which behaviors and attitudes lose customers. - Ten easy, practical, and proven ways to immediately improve your customer experience. - What renowned companies do to offer the best customer experience. This book is for anyone who works serving customers in a B2C company or other businesses in a B2B environment. Everyone has an important role to play in creating a good customer experience, whether it be managers, associates, sales reps, marketing professionals, web strategists, accountants, customer service reps, delivery people, or installers. No matter what role you play, this book offers easy tips, recommendations, and examples to help improve customer experience, realistically, sustainably, and affordably.