Improving Customer Service: Case Studies and Recommendations

Case study 1: To Serve or Not To Serve?

To Serve or Not To Serve?

XYZ Co. is a high street retail company which is trying to differentiate itself via its service delivery. The company is a division of a large retail group. It has 2,000 employees and 200 shops. The company has been running two customer service programmes focused on front line staff over the past eighteen months.

The group measures customer service delivery in all divisional stores via a mystery shopping programme which is carried out every quarter. Currently XYZ Co. is bottom of the divisional league table and has been so for the past eighteen months. The operations director is particularly disappointed at this performance and is concerned that the customer service programmes have had little or no impact. As a result a team of consultants has been engaged to undertake a review of the company. You are that team.

The objectives of your review are to identify reasons why the organisation is performing badly in mystery shopper tests and the steps the organisation can take to make a quantum leap in its customer service. The operations director has given you access to the stores and their managers and staff.

You and your team have visited a cross-section of shops and interviewed members of managers and staff. You have also mystery shopped a selection of stores as a customer. The service you have received has been “indifferent” but certainly no better or worse than the majority of competing outlets on the high street. You have asked to interview members of the Head Office team but were told that “the customer service programme is focused on the shops not internal departments”, and permission was refused.

In your interviews with members of the management and staff, some consistent comments have been made about customer service and the organisational environment. A representative sample is given as follows.

Question:

Identify possible reasons why XYZ Co. does not appear to be customer focused. What hard and soft steps do you recommend that it should take to make the required “quantum leap” in its customer service?

The Library

A University library serves a number of different functions for a number of different client groups with different needs.  These range from the researcher requiring up to date access to the latest publications in the field to the 1st year undergraduate wanting somewhere quiet (and warm) to work. It thus provides both space and information, and of course, advice through its skilled staff.

Despite the growth of electronic data sources and remote access, University libraries are still primarily sources of printed information, in the form of books and periodicals. This case concerns the physical book stock of the library and is not concerned with issues of study space, access or electronic information.

It is a common complaint of library users that the books they require are either not in stock, or are already out on loan.  Given the finite nature of space and funds, there will always be a high probability that a book will be out on loan when required, and various ways of reducing the inconvenience this causes are used, for example, reservation, recall and short loan.

The issue of books not being in stock is more complex.  Librarians are not clairvoyant, and need requests from users in order to add new books to stock.  There is thus an inevitable time lag between the need arising and the book being available (this lag may be extended by the need to await funding, given the annual budget system, but that is hardly an operations issue).

Library Structure

The library is physically divided into different subject areas, each the responsibility of a subject team.  The subject team is responsible for the maintenance of the book and periodical stock in their area, dealing with user requests and queries, and offering training to users.

The Purchase Order and Cataloguing section is a centralised back office function responsible for order processing, progress chasing, and the inspection and cataloguing of books received. 

Ordering Procedure

The majority of new books are ordered to satisfy taught course requirements.  Since all courses provide reading lists for their students, the reading list is used as the driver for this process.  Module leaders are required to submit reading lists for their modules and the majority are received in June and July.  This is at the end of the financial year and the beginning of the holiday period.  The lists are submitted to the subject team for that particular subject area. Because these are part of student handouts, they contain a great deal of material which is not necessarily relevant - i.e. journal articles and books already in stock. They are also not necessarily complete and up to date. The subject team is responsible for checking that the books are not already in stock, that they actually exist, that the details are correct and that they are in print.  This leads to a list of proposed purchases, which is authorised by the senior librarian responsible for the subject team. The request is then sent to the acquisitions section.

Acquisitions first check the requested books for completeness and availability, then enter the order onto the computer system. The system generates printed orders for despatch to suppliers on a daily basis. When books are received, they are checked against the order, and the order file is updated. The books are then physically inspected,entered into the library catalogue, labelled with class marking, and security coded. They are then sent to the library.

The subject team checks the books on receipt and then puts them on the shelves or the new book display as appropriate.

Over a twelve-month period it was found that the process times were as shown in table 1.

The pattern is very seasonal as mentioned above. 

The orders received for input in the year in question followed the pattern in figure 1.\

Questions:

1. Identify the factors that are important in determining quality of service in a university/college library. How important is availability of books in this?

2. Chart the process for adding to the book stock of the library.

3. Critically appraise the process and chart a revised process based upon this.

4. What steps are needed to implement your revised process?