Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Would you recommend us to a friend?

The Ultimate Question - can one simple question determine the future of MPL? Or the future of IS? What would our customers say?

Interesting Article from Nextspace the OCLC Newsletter http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/005/1.htm

"...the world has changed, says Steve Hiller, Director of Assessment and Planning, University of Washington Libraries. Libraries are in a very competitive environment in the digital age.
“We are no longer the only information game in town, if we ever were,” he says. “Our communities have access to a vast array of information that we couldn’t even dream of ten years ago. The structured and controlled access to the world of information that libraries established during much of the 20th century has literally been blown away.”

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is the ultimate question but is it that simple? Reicheld links the "would you recommend us to a friend" question directly to revenue growth. Using programs as example - our customer satisfaction surveys indicate that 91.6% would recommend the program that they attended to family or friends. 1.1% say no (although half the nos come from children forced by parents to attend I still consider their "no" valid - even if forced to attend the end result should be that it was fun anyway.) I consider non-answers and incomplete surveys to be neutral and that accounts for 8.4%
Subtracting detractors from promoters our net score is still over 90% ... and yet ...

teens@mpl said...

Kaffeelutz;

I think you definitely made a great point.

Revenue and statistics are very important but what about the actual customer? How well do we actually know our customer? Are we meeting their needs/ What do we need to change?

In teen programming, some of our volunteers are there because they have to be and not because they want to be. Are we still meeting their needs?

Catherine G.