Dr Oh Dong Geun, Keimyung University, was passing through Singapore and gave a talk about his research on customer satisfaction with public libraries in South Korea on 16 June 2010. The talk was part of the NLB Professional Talk series which was open to LAS members.
After studying the various tools used to measure customer satisfaction which included Gronoos (1990), Martensen (2003) and Parasuraman (1988), Dr Oh developed his own Library Customer Service Index (LCSI). The LCSI survey was carried out at the public library at Daegu Metropolitan City and the National Library of Children and Young Adults in Korea.
Some of the factors included in the LCSI were: services provided by library staff; library materials; library resources; and facilities. Survey respondents were asked to value the services provided and rate their satisfaction.
The areas that respondents reported that they were satisfied included: collection, environment, and electronic resources. The areas that respondents reported that they were not satisfied included: opening hours, not being able to bring in their belongings, and “insufficient collection”.
He found that the satisfaction at the National Library of Children and Young Adults was higher than the public library at Daegu Metropolitan City. One similarity he found was that the perception of the users was consistently lower than the perception of the library staff at both libraries.
Dr Oh recommended using an 11-point Likert scale to provide enough points to differentiate satisfaction levels and to calculate the Net Promoter score. He also recommended surveying the community served by the library and not just focus on the users on the library at the time the survey was carried out.For more information about Dr Oh and his publications, you can check out his website.
He had also done research on the complaining behavior of academic library users in Korea (Oh, 2006). He suggested that a key way to improve library services was to provide various channels for complaints so that users find it easier to give feedback. It was important to follow up on the complaints and “to let them know publicly that library management have tried to respond to their complaints promptly and that feedback information from them have been used effectively to improve the library service” (Oh, 2006, 186).
Both the National University of Singapore Libraries and the Nanyang Technological University Libraries had done the first round of the LibQUAL survey. Check out the results of the survey carried out by NTU. NUS Libraries had released the results to their own community. Libraries usually carry out various surveys to find out how their users feel about aspects of their services. These surveys might be long and complex or short and simple for a specific service for a large or small sample of their population. As emphasized by Dr Oh, the main reason to get this feedback is to improve the quality of services. When there is an increase in the quality of service, there is an increase in customer satisfaction, which leads to greater customer loyalty and increased library usage. This helps us to secure our competitive advantage and to stay relevant to our customers, an outcome that we strive to achieve and to maintain.
Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin
References
- Gronroos, C. (1990). Service management and marketing: Managing the moment of truth in service competition. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
- Martensen, A., Grønholdt, L., & Kristensen, K. (2003).
Improving library users’ perceived quality, satisfaction and loyalty: An integrated measurement and management system. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 29(3), 140-147. - Oh, D. G. (2006). Complaining intentions and their relationships to complaining behavior of academic library users in South Korea. Library Management, 27 (3), 168 – 189.
- Parasuraman, A., Zeithmal, V.A. & Berry, L.L. (1988). SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality. Journal of Retailing, 64, 12-40.