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Languages : en
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Book Description
Historically, academic libraries have struggled with providing consistent customer service. How might understanding the underlying motivations of staff u2013 including student workers u2013 impact the quality of customer service an academic library is able to provide? This poster presents a theoretical model based on current research and literature that explores whether alternative customer service models -- where more time, energy, and passion is invested in the staff who interact with the public on a daily basis -- would result in academic libraries seeing a larger return on investment in terms of student success, faculty support, brand loyalty and advocacy, and overall user satisfaction. We will review the current research on consistent customer service in academic libraries and describe methods outside of the traditional library approaches that have been used to explore the principles behind employee motivation techniques and how they could be implemented to improve employee support and patron satisfaction. We plan to additionally present a model for research that would identify gaps (if any) between what employees identify as motivators and what their supervisors perceive as motivators, to be able to offer recommendations to better train both employees and supervisors to provide higher quality customer service.