The University of Hull, Brynmor Jones Library was first awarded Customer Service Excellence in 2019, successfully achieving the University’s first Customer Service Excellence award. Customer Service Excellence is a mark of quality for our services which is focused towards the individual needs and preferences of our customers. It creates opportunities to provide innovative and improved services, striving to go above and beyond expectation.
We are now in a rolling programme of annual assessments to maintain the Standard. In February 2023 we successfully completed our third rolling assessment, having gathered a portfolio of evidence which was supported by an in-person visit from an independent assessor who spent a day in the library observing our operations and talking to our staff, customers and partners. We were delighted to achieve Compliance in all areas and to further achieve Compliance Plus* in five areas.
Our assessor was particularly impressed with how engaged and empowered front-line staff are in developing fantastic customer service and the way we work with partners, saying:
“This was an onsite visit which, once again, served to emphasise the strength of your front-line staff. How well they worked as a team, and the extent to which they contribute to service development. Two things stood out from the assessment. First, the empowerment of staff across a number of areas. Many of the ideas for service improvement come from them, for example, the introduction of job shadowing with internal partners, and the sharing of good practice. This is mirrored by the preparedness of the director and his managers to empower them. The second, is the impact that the Customer Experience Team is having more widely across the University through your Associate Director’s secondment to the COO.”
In order to be recognised as achieving Customer Service Excellence, the Library created an extensive portfolio of evidence which was presented and assessed by an external licensed body. The detailed criteria found in the Customer Service Excellence standard is split into five sections: