Service Marketing in Library - Coursework Example

Education and fully paid for education particularly has acquired the status of a service industry and students are variedly viewed as customers. For instance, in the UK, Higher Education (HE) students were treated as the “primary customers” of a University (Crawford, 1991), even before the introduction of the system of paying the tuition fees “up-front”. This customer view of students makes the university offerings open to evaluation for satisfaction and contributes immensely to the image of the university which may have serious student retention implications apart from affecting the overall pool of potential entrants to the concerned university and school. As James et al (1999) state that the overall image of a university has a strong impact on the retention of current students and the attraction of potential students. It is also not hard to logically conclude that a university or a school that has a poor image and reputation amongst its existing students and potential students would find it extremely difficult to attract funding and grants which would put the institution in a vicious circle of low funding-poor category students’ pool and make for a loosing commercial and educational proposition.

The overall offering of a university, when viewed in the context of a service offering, comprises a service component and a product component as (Sasser et al., 1978) state that the outcome of service delivery is a tangible product and a “bundle” of goods and services as the product offering. In the case of a university, the products’ components can be thought of as comprising of lectures and tutorials, presentation slides, supplementary handout documents/materials, and the prescribed texts. More importantly, this product component can also include physical facilities such as the libraries, lecture halls, and tutorial rooms and overall standard of furnishing, presentation, lighting, and layout as well as ancillary services such as catering and recreational facilities.

Service component, on the other hand, can include the overall teaching and research capabilities of the faculty, knowledge levels of another category of staff like faculty assistants, the rigor of the syllabi, consistency in maintaining pedagogy quality irrespective of faculty availability, and easy and open interface with all categories of staff that makes for a comfortable pedagogy at the institution and the overall management of the program and workload for the students, apart from making the exit of student smooth through rich and well-connected placement services. As an extension and broadening of the services component often the following are included as well- overall treatment of students by staff which may be measured in terms of an amiable demeanor that is imbued with friendliness, openness and honesty, empathy with problems of students valuing the opinions and demands of students, sans bureaucracy rendering of various services promptly and the overall ability and sincerity of the staff, capability, and competence of staff. The extended service component may also include the overall environment of the institution to make the student feel at home apart from sending a constant feeling that the student is upgrading his skills and capabilities. Most importantly impartial evaluation standards make for a major determinant of the quality of this service component.

However, students and schools are dealing with knowledge, and knowledge is acquired through published text and resources. Classroom knowledge is core knowledge; however, it is supplanted essentially by the library resources of the institution concerned. Baker (1997) observed that students primarily utilize libraries to either complete educational and course-related assignments or for intellectual development. Some institutions are known for their rich and wide library resources and enjoy a high image in academic circles on account of this factor alone. As yet, in today’s advanced and information-savvy world, most educational institutions make systematic attempts to augment their library resources; however, these institutions are faced with another major problem, i.e. low or sub-optimal utilization of such library resources by their students. This problem plagues many large-sized libraries that exist as stand-alone institutions as well. Some studies document the use of library resources by faculty and/or students in the literature; however, most of the latest literature concerns the usage of the Internet and/or the other electronic sources of the library (Applebee et al., 2000; Teo, 2001; Adika, 2003; Uddin, 2003) or computer resources at such libraries (Durndell and Haag, 2002; North and Noyes, 2002; Gordon et al.,2003). The studies about traditional brick&mortar libraries are not of recent dates.