Service Quality and Customer's Satisfaction in Academic Libraries - Essay Example

Service quality and s satisfaction in academic libraries The contemporary library: An overview Libraries assemble the literature and provide people with intellectual access to it. The extensive use of information technologies that has been made in the recent years has aroused many challenges as well as opportunities for the administrators of academic libraries. Librarians have been forced to redefine and reconsider the services, collections, facilities and competency criteria of the library staff. The altered library practices have improved in terms of their commitment and quality of service in general. The improved service thus obtained has made a library, much more than simply an assemblage of books and numerous sources of knowledge. A real library contains these along with various instructional and access tools and a high quality customer service. In a library, the fundamental goal of a librarian is to make sure that the service provided is consistent with the mission of the institution of which library forms a part. Service quality of academic libraries: Past and present: Service quality of an academic library is a measure of the customer satisfaction and the extent to which customers feel that their expectations have meet met by the service given. Calculation and management of the customer satisfaction has remained a usual practice in for-profit sector for long. The assessment of service quality in the present age finds its roots in the same old trend of measurement of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction has frequently undergone many changes in the last four decades as a concept. According to Crosby (1993), the contemporary concept of service quality is significantly influenced by all the approaches made to it in that past that include the 1960s’ corporate image studies and the 1980s’ total quality approach adopted by many economies in the West. The corporate image studies formed the very initial stage of calculation of customer satisfaction that emerged in the 1960s. The image surveys included questions about customer satisfaction and customers’ views about the quality of service given. These questions investigated the progressiveness and the company’s level of engagement with the community. In the later half of the 1960s, the commencement of studies about the product quality emerged as the second stage of customer satisfaction measurement. A satisfaction index resulted from the adequacy-importance model which served as the cardinal means of measurement of the customer satisfaction, and played an important role in defining the attitudes of the customers. A revolution in the customer satisfaction measurement occurred in the 1980s when the American automobile business increased manifolds in competition and many syndicated studies were made. The measurement of customer satisfaction in the contemporary age is quite similar to the trend introduced in the 1980s. The businesses turned to customer satisfaction as a measurement of their quality of service rather and the process of assessment became more intangible. The Gaps Model of Service Quality: Parasuraman, Berry and Zeithaml (1985) formed a research group to measure the customer satisfaction using the Gaps Model of Service Quality. The Gaps Model made a totally new approach to the measurement of customer satisfaction by determining the gaps between the expectations of customers and their views regarding the quality of service. In this model, customers establish their expectations, as well as the lowest quality of service that would be acceptable to them. Then once the service has been delivered, the customer explains how he thinks about the quality of service he/she was delivered. The equation, thus, goes as follows: Perceived service quality – expected service quality = gap in service quality. According to Hernon and Nitecki (2001), there are four basic perspectives that define the quality of service namely, excellence, value, compliance with specifications, and achievement of expectations. It is the fourth perspective that is given primary importance by a vast majority of the library researchers. The same perspective is employed in the Gaps Model of Service Quality in its framework when it tends to quantify the gap in the quality of service delivered to the customers. The Gaps Model actually stretches the fourth perspective to accommodate a fifth perspective by defining the gaps which keep a company from delivering a high level of service to its customers. The expectations of customers are quite subjective in the Gaps Model and are totally defined by a customer’s understanding of the importance of a specific attribute of a company. The level of service is weighed according to the perceptions of customers. Ways to improve the quality of service of an academic library: The level of service provided in academic libraries can be raised in many ways. One of the most fundamental ways to do this is to measure both the customer’s perception and expectation from service. The librarians should try to enhance the service along with minimizing the cost. Although it apparently seems impossible to achieve as quality and cost are conventionally directly proportional in all kinds of works, yet it can be made possible by making the library free of all sorts of non-value adding items and processes. Maximum use of technology should be made along with simplifying the service system in order to enhance the productivity. Quality of academic library service in the University of East London (UEL): The service provided in the UEL library is directed at providing the consumers with extreme quality. The quality improvement model in place in UEL delivers excellent service through enabling connection among members of the academic community, raising the standard of service, supervising the delivery of service, taking feedback from the customers and addressing their individualistic and collective concerns, accommodating the concerns of customers in the planning of services and developing the staff competence by providing the staff with training. UEL publishes its service standard on line and makes it visible to the community inside the library as well. One of the most important features of the system in place in UEL is that it provides the students with the facility to send their feedback through whatever means they feel comfortable with. Every year, as many as three to four surveys are conducted that are developed according to the themes carefully retrieved from the feedback of the students. A published system of measurement explains the way UEL quantifies the established performance indicators. The level of service provided by UEL serves as a benchmark for other universities that aim at improving the quality of their service. Library in UEL remains open 24 / 7 while the semesters are in progress. Even in some weeks of Easter and Christmas holidays, UEL provides students with 24 / 7 access to the library. The library remains open on most of the Bank holidays. UEL provides 12 hr help service during semesters and an 8 hr help services during vacations. When semesters are in progress, students can seek help from 9 in the morning till 9 in the night, whereas when holidays are in progress, help is provided between 9 in the morning till 5 in the evening. In addition to this, UEL provides its students with a wonderful “Ask-a-Librarian” online service to help them. In this service, students can do live chat with the librarian for as many as 20 hours per week while semesters are in progress. The library is equipped with latest sources of information in printed, audiovisual and electronic forms which students can borrow as needed. Currently, number of printed books in the UEL library is 304415. There are 1161 e-books and as many as 35 databases for the students. Students have access to all textbooks that are included in the course taught in the university. The university also provides its students with a web based catalogue. It is very simple in use and students can approach it from any place outside the campus as well. Scanners, Braille printers and text speakers are made available for use to the disabled students and students suffering from dyslexia. In every library in UEL, specific areas have been designed for individual study and collective study. The study space is calm and quiet. UEL library attracts as many as 1.5 million visitors on daily basis. There are 1000 study spaces with a calm and quiet atmosphere. Number of digital archive images in UEL is 25000. In UEL library system, customers’ concerns are timely addresses. According to the records kept by UEL, the different areas students generally had concerns about are depicted in the chart below: Areas of user compliment in UEL library (McDonald, n.d.). Some of the problems that students in UEL commonly faced are discussed below along with the measures UEL library staff took to solve them: 1. Some customers were initially having problem in choosing the right database for their academic subjects. In order to solve their problem, the university linked the databases and e-journals with the pages of the subject. This allowed the students to find out the databases that applied to their respective subjects without any inconvenience. 2. Some students required to be given more quiet space so that they could conduct their individual study in a better way. In order to address their concern, the library administration provided them with the facility to study in the Great Hall with their laptops. 3. There were students who did not find the atmosphere in the UEL library cool enough to study with comfort. To improve the ventilation and minimize the noise, the university invested up to two million pounds to install adequate HVAC equipment and sound absorbing system. 4. Some students complained that they could not renew their books if they had been fined. Also, they were having difficulty finding the books in the right place because students would take the books and leave them in the wrong place. To address this issue, the UEL library provided the students with an opportunity to renew their books irrespective of their fines. The administration assured the students that the shelvers had started to take more care to keep the shelves neat and tidy. The following table shows the marking done by students in various areas on average: Survey of UEL Student Satisfaction. (McDonald, n.d.). In light of the discussion made in this paper, it can be safely said that UEL provides its students and customers with a high quality of service. The fundamental criterion of judgment of the quality of service provided by an academic library is the value it places on the feedback of the customers and the extent to which it addresses their concerns. As indicated above, UEL library constantly monitors the concerns of customers and the staff does every possible effort to solve their individualistic and collective problems. This makes the quality of service outstanding and worth relying upon. References: Crosby, LA 1993, Measuring customer satisfaction, In E. E. Scheuing & W. F. Christopher (Eds.), The service quality handbook (pp. 389-407), New York: Amacom. Hernon, P, & Nitecki, D 2001, Service quality: A concept not fully explored, Library Trends, vol. 49, 687-708. McDonald, A n.d., Service quality: UEL Library and Learning Services. Parasuraman, A, Berry, LL, & Zeithaml, VA 1985, A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research, Journal of Marketing, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 41-50. Read More