LMS musings: customer management

I wanted front-line staff to have the opportunity for a bit of structured brainstorming amongst themselves without (at this stage) being prompted or led by somebody higher up in the food chain. But I also wanted to avoid their feeling left to flounder so I circulated a note to help get them started. The responses to date have been very useful. I wish we were currently able to free them up for a get-together to bounce ideas around more thoroughly, I know it would be very productive.

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Library customers (not only borrowers!) management — brainstorming the business needs

We want you to think about how we would use a new library management system (LMS) to manage our customers, and not just borrowers.

If at all possible, we need to include all our customers in the system and if at all possible we need to have auditable data about all our customer transactions. In reality this isn’t always practicable or desirable but we need to include as many customers as possible.

What we want you to do:

1. Start with a blank sheet of paper. Or some post-it notes if you prefer.
2. The questions are:
1. What information do we need to be able to provide services to our customers?
2. What information do we need to make sure that we’re providing the appropriate services for each customer?
3. What information do we need to make sure that we’re putting the right resources (staff, stock, events or whatever) in the right places to deliver these services?
4. How do we prove that we’re earning our keep and doing it right?
5. How do we prove that we’re meeting the needs of the whole community?
3. Forget about what how we do things now.
4. Think about what we should be doing now and what you think we will need to be doing in the future.
5. Don’t worry about putting the ideas you have into any sort of order, just get the idea noted down while you remember what it was.
6. Once you’ve got your ideas noted down you might want to come back to them and decide whether each one is something:
• We need;
• We want; or
• We would like.

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Before you start, have a look at a few issues that we need to bear in mind…

All systems begin and end with somebody wanting something to happen.

A computer is not a system and a system does not need a computer.

Your business needs are:

• What needs to happen at the beginning?
• How will you know it has happened at the end?
• Don’t get bogged down with the intermediary steps; and definitely don’t get bogged down by “this is what we do now”
• At this stage of the game you’re wanting to know whether the system delivers the end product.

The way that you work with a new LMS will be very different to the way you work with Dynix.

• Different systems will work in different ways. I guarantee that any new library management system will not work like Dynix and will not be “a more modern version of Dynix.” For better and worse it will be very different.
• The technical installation of a new LMS is the easy bit. The hard bit is changing the way you work so that your business processes take advantage of the most efficient and effective ways of using your new system to deliver your services, rather than bodging the new system to mimic existing business processes and compromising the services in the process. This is referred to as process re-engineering. This needs to be a constant process, starting as early as possible during the installation and continuing until you start installing your next management system.

Don’t confuse process and product.

• Do you want that green flashing light because the system’s designed to give you a green flashing light or because you want the system to tell you that something’s just happened? In which case, would something else do the job just as well?

Think about how you as a customer would want to interact with the Library Service.

• The Library Service is not a building, and a building isn’t the Library Service. We can, do, and will increasingly provide library services beyond the walls of the library building.
• When you log onto an e-commerce site like Amazon or Tesco Online; or onto a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter, the system…
• Provides you with information/advertising based on your previous activities;
• Provides you with information/advertising from resources/people you have said you’re interested in; and
• Provides a personal service to you.

So can, and should, your LMS.

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Help sheet
(Only to be used as a last resort if the blank sheet of paper’s getting to be too intimidating!)

Seriously, only use these questions if you desperately need a kick-start to get yourself going. We want as many ideas and perspectives as possible and we don’t want you to feel that you’ve got to follow this structure.

• Who uses the library?
• What are the different needs of different customers?
• What do we want them to do?
• What do we want them not to do?
• What do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What else do they do?
• Where?
• When?
• Were we any use to them?
• What information do we need about them?
• How do we keep their custom?
• How do we market our services to our customers?

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Renew, Refresh, Recycle

With the best will in the world, all of our catalogues will have a few skeletons in the closet. Human beings being human beings there's always the odd book that's been missed by the stock editors. They're not necessarily the liability they seem to be. They shouldn't be on the open shelves as items of current import, to be sure, but there are creative ways of using them, together with a selection of the "respectable" components of your reserve stock to make useful and informative display collections.

Public libraries hold a lot of the national back-catalogue of books. This is generally held to be important as far as fiction is concerned but, aside from a small proportion of 'classic' texts, not non-fiction. After all, out-of-date information is useless, right?

Not necessarily.

Imagine a view of the history of Germany through the eyes of somebody who didn't know that the Berlin Wall was ever to come down. Or go up in the first place. Or that Hitler would rise to power in 1933. Or... Well you get the idea.

It's easy with history, isn't it? What about science? The history of science is littered with the dead bodies of fallen ideas and Laws Of Science. I remember being baffled at university (yonks ago) by the civil war between the cladists and the phylogenetic gradualists (you'll have to look them up) - they were talking about aspects of the same idea, just using different language with all the intemperance of theologians disputing one or other heresy. A generation before it was the geosyncline versus plate tectonics debate. All a bit specialist and arcane, eh? Not really - all the time that the aeroplanes were grounded by the Icelandic volcano our newspapers were filled with diagrams of plate tectonic processes. How would they have been described fifty years ago?

And as for technology... It struck me recently that the world I grew up in as a very small child in the 60s wasn't wholly dissimilar to that of my parents' childhood (excluding powdered egg and the Luftwaffe). The Swinging Sixties didn't much reach our way, save for the Beatles and beehive hairdos. My brother was born into a world of colour television. My sister-in-law can't imagine a world without computers and MTV. Children born today would struggle with the idea of not having a mobile 'phone with a camera and internet access and umpteen thousand channels and applications. And we've still not got those personalised jet packs and robot butlers.

One of the reasons why primary resources are important is that they are uncontaminated by hindsight. Hindsight always has 20:20 vision. We know what happens at the end and that inevitably colours the narrative. History tells us which were the blind alleys, the discarded values, the paradigm shifts. And hindsight always imposes the prejudices and values of today onto the thoughts and actions of yesterday.

There is a case for our provided access to the unsullied product once every so often in "What we used to know" promotions to give us a better understanding of the historical context. It's not always enough to know how we got here, it's sometimes important to understand what happened along the way.

LMS musings

I'm working up a functional specification for a new LMS, to replace Dynix. I'll miss Dynix when the time comes: what it does it does nicely, unfortunately what it doesn't do is telling on us badly. But time moves on and we need to plan ahead for a system that'll meet our emerging business needs as much as the established ones.

We've got a copy of the UK Core Specification to act as a backbone to our own. The UKCS is precisely what it says on the tin and necessarily a bit basic. Even so, I think there are a couple of omissions in key areas that need tackling:

• Customer management sort of runs through the UKCS but entirely from the point of view of library processes rather than customer focus. We need to be able to use the LMS proactively as a market-research tool just as much as a gateway for delivering services. We also need to be able to provide a personalised service, aggregating an appropriate mix of services, not necessarily all provided by us. Customers in this sense shouldn't only mean individuals, we also need to think about how we provide an appropriate suite of services for groups and communities within the borough.
• Enquiry management doesn't appear at all. Coming from the advice centre and one-stop-shop services as I did it came as a shock to find that dealing with enquiries weren't a key metric. We still don't know, for instance, what proportion of our enquiry desk workload is generated by factors entirely under our control such as signage and display of materials. We also don't have a systematic mechanism for keeping track of FAQs and fugitive facts (we have the tools for the doing of, but that's not the same thing).

I'm currently picking the brains of front-line staff on these and a couple of other areas. I'll also be having a chat with RMBC's Contact Centre to see what their requirements are. We'd want the LMS to be able to work seamlessly with the corporate CRM but the much more important question is: what would they need the LMS to deliver so that they can provide a better service to our customers?

Fun things to do

Yet another tip of the hat to Phil Bradley, this time for his "25 tools to entertain, educate, enthrall."

And another tip of the hat to him for providing not just a dozen or more applications I hadn't bumped into yet but also a bit of thought as to actually apply them in practice. As always, the tool is only ever as useful as the use to which it is put. A few of these look like they could make up into useful guiding tools for learning resources (staff as much as the public). Something for me to have a seriously long look this summer when I'm not so overwhelmed with work. (He said optimistically!)

Driving Change, Creating Experience & Moving Forward

A very nice presentation on Michael Stephens' "Tame The Web" site. I particularly like the slides which show some unflinchingly unflattering perspectives of libraries from the customer's point of view. (It's been one of those months!) It's reassuring that I'm not entirely on my own in worrying about some of the bad habits of libraries.

There are a lot of slides in this presentation, but that's OK, I promise you, because each one's quick and punchy and leads you swiftly on to the next. And the journey's worthwhile:

• The strength of a library, particularly a public library, is its potential for being inclusive of a community and its being a trusted knowledge base within that community.
• The survival of libraries depends on its active engagement with the community and, perhaps more crucially, the active engagement of a critical mass of individual customers and stakeholders.

There are a lot of very easy, affordable, friendly and fun ways of turning the passive customer or potential customer into an active user and participant without losing sight of the core business of the libary. Quite a few are included here in a nicely-digestible form.

Self-service - the "how not to do it" workshop

My bank's changed it's self-service paying-in system. In doing so it has provided an object lesson in how not to design and deliver a self-service solution.

Up to a couple of months ago it was dead simple:

• Go to the bank.
• Pick up an envelope.
• Put the details of the payments-in on the slip attached.
• Put your slip and cheque(s) in the envelope.
• Seal envelope.
• Put envelope in the box provided.
• Go away and get on with your life.

From the customer's point of view this was good:

• No queueing
• The transaction took a minute or two tops.

From the bank's point of view it was bad:

• Anybody who wanted could could fill in spurious details on the receipt slip and claim that the transaction had taken place as described.
• Employees of the bank had to manually retrieve the slips and cheques then effect the transaction.

The balance of power lying with the bank, not the customer, the system had to change. So we now have these self-service machines to use. Which means that you now:

• Queue to use the machine
• Log in with your bank card and PIN
• Stare at a menu providing a choice of options, most of which are not appropriate to the function. Paying in is the second from the bottom on the right.
• Feed the slip and the first cheque into the machine.
• Get a member of staff to help you work out why the papers were accepted the first couple of times of trying.
• Wait for a scanned copy of the cheque and slip is printed as a receipt.
• Repeat the above for each cheque being presented.

These days I queue up and pay in with the cashiers.

"Do you know that you could do this with the self-service machine?"

"Yes, that's why I queued up to be served by a cashier."

"Why's that?"

"Three people have used the machine since I came in. I'd still be fourth in the queue waiting my turn."

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Make Do & Mend

I recently read an article about funding pressures on libraries and one comment in particular struck me:

"We may be entering an age of austerity where getting the basics right and on budget will be of greater value than leading the pack on innovation."

This is where many of us have been all along. Which is not to say that we are strangers to innovation. We can't afford to be early adopters of expensive experiments but we can be innovative. Innovation thrives on adversity, after all. It just won't often be revolutionary change (let's be honest, anybody looking to the English public library sector for revolutionary change needs their bumps feeling). It can be, and often is, sustained small incremental changes which aren't remotely sexy but deliver the goods.

When times are hard there is a biting incentive for change and, importantly, it is more difficult to go out and buy a magic wand in the hopes that it will make everything all right in the end. Which is good: one of the stultifying factors to progressive development is the argument that something cannot be done because "we haven't got Item X." This may be a computer, some software, access to the internet, somebody with the job of doing something, a bit of training, or whatever. You've been there, you know what I mean. Of course, the truth is that this something can't be done that way because we haven't got Item X. If that something still needs to be done (and it does no harm to ask the question), there are three options:

1. Get Item X;
2. Find a way of doing the necessary without Item X; or
3. Keep your head down and hope that the whole thing will go away.

It's dispiriting to see how often option three comes into play in the public library sector.

As a matter of principle it's important to know what you've got and what it can do, that's simple resource management. When the brown stuff hits the fan this can be the difference between success and failure. How flexible and adaptable are your systems? Systems begin with and end with a human being.

• How knowledgeable is your workforce? — how do you know?
• How 'sharing' is your organisational culture? — go on, be honest, if only with yourself. Why do libraries, of all things, persist in having 'need to know' cultures?
• How flexible is your workforce? — have a serious think about the next question before you answer this one!
• How flexible is your management?

Maximising the effectiveness and efficiencies of what you've already got isn't a new challenge, but it is one we can no longer duck. Small systemic changes can make big differences. But only if they can be applied systemically and bought into by the organisation and its managers both.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries

Another useful checklist (why do they always have to have ten items?) of tips for social networking for libraries (thanks to Kasia and Michael). The tips are derived from a digital marketing conference; just because it's not "by" libraries or librarians doesn't mean that it can't be usefully applied in libraries. Like so many of these lists it's all dead obvious when you see it written down; deceptively simple until you try to apply them in practice. The sad thing is that I think Tip #10 is the single biggest obstacle for most development work in public libraries.

Presentations that rock

The do's and don'ts of presentations are simple but easy to forget. There's a nice summary of the key points on Marianne's MLxperience blog.

I make no apologies for 'borrowing" this footage of Don MacMillan's PowerPoint presentation.

Demonstrating the Return on Investment: God is watching, give him a good show

By any objective measure a large sum of money is invested in the public library service. We can make a good case for its not being enough, or the wrong kind of investment, but it's still a goodly sum.

The return on that investment can be relatively colossal, whether you measure the impacts in terms of literacy or well-being, supporting economic or community development. But we sort of take it for granted that people know that, don't we? While other services make damned sure that everyone who matters knows every single thing that they do (and every one of them dressed up to the nines as a major success) public libraries tend to pootle along, doing their thing until there's talk of cuts and closures, when suddenly all the positives are wheeled out. In many ways that's too late: to be sure, you may be able to stave off the major cuts in bad times but are you in a position to be able to capitalise on the good times?

• Libraries do a lot of stuff. In practice this is great, but it's difficult to sell "we do a lot of stuff" as a single message without looking and sounding incoherent. So let's not do that. Let's work with small, digestible lumps of news and information that make a single, sensible, positive point.
  


• Little and often is good. The individual message is: "this is something the library does/did and it is A Good Thing." The repeat message is "libraries do good things." Importantly, the message is sustained over time.
  


• "We're not doing anything we can make a fuss about." Bollocks. Take a look around you. Other people's high-profile media events: the festivals; the open days; the big-name events. How many people turned up? And how many people do you get to your events? Have a look round at your local context and be more realistic about what you're able to achieve. Then celebrate what you do achieve!
  


• "That's been and gone. What's the point in putting that on the web?" You've done something. It cost time and money to do it. Why? What did you get for it? More importantly, what did the public get for it? Tell them what you've spent their money on.
  


• "Yes, but it's history, isn't it? What's the point of telling people what we've done?" You and your staff aren't standing round waiting to "stamp out a few books" are you? That's precisely what a lot of people do think you do. Your overall message needs to be: "we do lots of stuff and here's just some of it!" You can't prove that you do lots of good stuff without having a good range readily available to demonstrate the point.
  


• "Yes, but that's just politicking or swank, isn't it?" NO!!!! This is an important part of your catalogue of services. Just as your library catalogue (remember that?) tells your customers what resources may be available for them to use, this collection of news and information items tells your customers and potential customers about the kinds of services and activities that you're delivering, or have delivered, in your libraries. And, importantly, it gives people with money and influence an idea of what you can do given the time and resources.
  


• Spread the word: don't rely on a single channel of communication. If you've got something good to say, say it in a few places. Take the message to your intended (or hoped-for) audience, don't sit back and expect them to hunt you down.

None of this is difficult and none of it is new. We just need to do it.