Archive for the ‘insights’ Category

after sales care: learning from the experts (in more ways than one)

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

At Aurora this past week, I was chatting with one of the facilitators, Becky Schreiber, who mentioned that she had bought a year’s worth of training along with her MacBook, using Apple’s One to One program. For $99 a year, you  can take advantage of up to 52 one hour sessions with a Mac trainer. The training takes place in Apple stores, one-on-one, and covers a huge variety of topics. (I’ve never heard of this before: do they do this in Australia?)

Why is this so great?

  • First up, they’re making money from this - not a great deal, but they’re making some money where their staff would otherwise be idle.
  • They’re maximising the amount of productive time their store staff have (I think - I’m working on the assumption that the training is run by sales staff - correct me if I’m wrong) - instead of downtime between customers, store staff could potentially be training customers.
  • They’re up-skilling their users and creating power users. Power users are going to use products to their full and to my mind, are probably going to be a whole lot more likely to invest in other products
  • Cost/benefit wise, this program has the potential to yield excellent return on investment for customers, and for Apple.
  • They’re helping customers to become fully acquainted with the product, and to learn about all the features and benefits that they might otherwise never discover. Enlightened customers have the potential to use products to their fullest. I don’t know about you, but every time I discover something new I can do with one of my gadgets, I’m even more satisfied with my decision to buy it.

Becky suggested that it would be great if libraries could figure out a way to do something similar. How could we capitalise on the time when we’re not interacting with customers in our traditional roles to provide this kind of personalised, value added service? What a great idea, and one that warrants some thinking.

Instead of just signing customers up and handing over their membership cards, what if we offered them an appointment to come back and spend half an hour with a librarian, to assist them discover what the library has to offer? It wouldn’t even necessarily need to be a one-on-one session. We could simply offer every new customer the chance to book in for a group-based new customer tutorial, where we could feasibly run through the features and benefits of the product (ie. the library) they’ve just bought into and show them how to get the most out of it.

What if we invested even ten minutes orienting every new customer with, for example, the catalogue and our online resources before we hand their card over and send them on their merry way? We’d be on the way to creating happy, power users, and happy, power users are more likely to become regular users who want more of what we have to offer.

A number of libraries already offer customers the opportunity to make an appointment to chat with a librarian, through “book a librarian” or “book an information coach” sessions. But what if we said, to every new customer, “would you like a librarian with that library card?”

How many of our customers really know what the library can do for them, and how they can get the most out of the library? Getting them in the door is only half the battle. How do we keep them coming back?

After sales care and training for library customers? What a great idea! Thanks, Becky!

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on 2.0ness

Sunday, August 12th, 2007
Interesting response from John Blyberg to David Lee King’s spectrum of 2.0ness, including this insightful comment:
There is, indeed, an existential component to Library 2.0, but it’s the same
aesthetic that drives all librarians into the profession–chances are, if you’re
reading this, it’s in you regardless of your thoughts on L2. What makes
Library 2.0 different is that we can manifest that passion to share and broker
knowledge in a fantastically new egalitarian space. [my italics]

I like this! This is the true beauty of Web2.0 - its ability to give everyone (well, everyone on this side of the digital divide) a voice, a space, an opportunity to interact. And that’s what libraries are all about. And that’s undoubtedly why we’ve grabbed the swag of Web2.0 tools and run.

Getting back to the topic of David Lee King’s original posts on the spectrum: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what 2.0 technologies we could harness at mpow to deliver effective, efficient and responsive online services. It’s given me a new appreciation for the idea that the technology is not the end; rather, it’s the means to the end. In my work, providing and promoting online services is the end. 2.0 technologies are one set of tools I can use to facilitate this. But it’s no good implementing the tools for the sake of playing with technology (not in a service delivery context, anyway - I certainly play for play’s sake in my own time). The tool has got to fit the job. We (ie all of us - everyone who does this kind of work) need to envision the online library branches we want to build, and then select the right tools to build and develop them. It’s no good saying “Twitter is cool. Let’s start tweeting”, if we have no real need to Tweet.

David Lee King’s spectrum is interesting, but it’s kind of like, to get over to the ‘enlightened’ side, you need to tick the boxes - get a flickr account, start an IM service, get a library blog… I’m just concerned that sometimes we’re (I’m?) ticking the boxes for the sake of ticking the boxes. That we’re getting 2.0 because it’s the thing to do, not because it’s what we need to do to deliver robust, responsive, needed services. I think we should choose carefully from the swag of 2.0 tools those that will help us in meeting the end towards which we’re working, rather than those that we can kinda sorta use if we try really hard.

Note to self: define the end, then pick the tool. And don’t get (too) caught up in the shininess.

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