Event Review: Excelsior: Moving Upwards with the Customer Service Excellence Standard with Sarah Wolfenden

SLA Europe DigiComms

Our thanks to Karen Tulett for writing this review of Sarah Wolfenden’s SLA Europe & PI Professional Development Award conference session. Karen is Director of EMEA BIS, Publishing and Translation Services at Morgan Stanley. Sarah’s post on her experience at the PI conference will follow soon.

Sarah Wolfenden was the winner of the PI and SLA Europe Professional Development Award and as such was given the  opportunity to host a workshop at the Perfect Information Conference in May.  The PIC is well known in the industry for its depth and diversity of speakers and the thought of presenting to the ‘great and the good’ may have been off-putting for some , but Sarah’s session was delivered with poise and verve.  There was ‘audience’ participation, thoughtful discussion and a healthy use of post-it notes!

Sarah’s workshop was based on the Customer Service Excellence Standard Project and its implementation at Brunel University Library.   The workshop covered  an outline of the standard, reasons for choosing CSES at Brunel, the process and the benefits of being involved in gaining accreditation; including the highs, the lows, and the pitfalls!  We were encouraged to think about how we value the customer experience within our own organisations and where there is potential to raise satisfaction levels for both the clients and staff.   Sarah got us to think actively about  how we engaged with our customer base; how did we know whether we were providing an excellent service? What did our clients really want?

Despite coming from array of different organisations we found we had similar experiences and issues relating to our clients and our engagement with them. For instance, when asked to discuss in groups what question we would really like to ask our users, the response of ‘why they think all information is free’ provoked knowing looks and laughter from nearly all participants!  I am not alone…

Some of the techniques used by Sarah and her colleagues to engage with their users base were particularly interesting; blogs, Twitter, a post-it note suggestion wall  to name but a few.  The creativity and drive of Sarah and her colleagues definitely gave me food for thought and the interactive nature of Sarah’s session made me actively consider how I engage with my client base. Whilst accreditation may not have been for everyone at the workshop the principals of Customer Excellence rang true for all, and I for one will be  ordering a multitude of post-it notes!

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