Carlos on Customer Service

The Library in the University of Tasmania is well known for its customer service among students and staffs to the point that it is its main motto. We try to build on that reputation in our Service Desk which is located in the Library and use some Library staff in our Tier1 front line.  

The first thing to have in mind is that our internal knowledge about procedures, services and related self help tools is the core and the way we present this knowledge to our client is the customer service. Therefore to make a service desk staff confident in providing a good service, you need to start in providing it with a good training in our procedures, services and related self help tools.

Now good customer service , I tell  new recruits, is basically to provide a nice experience to our customers so they always leave happy and would come back happy without any hesitation  if they need our services again, even in the undesired situation that we do not solve a particular  problem or answer a query to a fully satisfaction, we always need to show that we try our best. In brief, good customer service is meeting client needs in harmonious fashion with our limited resources. We measure how well we are doing using client satisfaction surveys and are proud in having a loyal client base. We , in the Service Desk, attend clients by phone, email and in person. All front line staff need general communicational skills such as good listening ,  problem solving and building client rapport besides depending of the role will  require  other specific  customer service techniques.

On the phone is important also to have a standard pleasant greeting, nice tone of voice and to nicely transferring callers on putting them on hold if necessary. In person is important to show good body language. On email is important to have some good writing skills. You could teach all these general and specific communicational skills from scratch, however if we recruit the right person from the beginning then we only need to work and improve on some weaknesses.

I normally recruit new front line service desk staff from applicants who have been in the customer service business before and if a particular one shows potential due to technical knowledge but not have a previous customer service experience then I make sure that this potential employee have friendly manners and hire him/her  initially as casual .

It is important for new recruits to have an internal coach (it can be either an experienced staff or myself) who help them to cope and improve  with the job at the beginning.

Finally it is important to acknowledge and if possible reward in some way our very good staff because at the end only having employees who go the extra mile in providing customer service will give us the opportunity of building a great customer service organization.

This page was last updated on July 10, 2005.