Monday, December 10, 2007

Are You Raking In the Compliments?

Since many librarians prefer not to toot their own horns, why not let your customers sing your praises for you? Last week’s Get to the Po!nt e-newsletter was a great reminder that we need to make it easy for happy customers to compliment us. The newsletter referenced a post at Andy Sernovitz’s interesting Damn! I Wish I’d Thought of That! blog (subscribed!) and included Sernvitz’s tips for opening the door to positive feedback:

  • Let customers leave compliments on an "Employee Thank You" wall stocked with paper, pencils and thumbtacks.
  • Ask your customers to vote in the Employee of the Month contest.
  • Put your Web site's feedback form in a prominent location.
  • Invite free-form comments on post-purchase surveys. "You're not going to get praise from a multiple-choice question," writes Sernovitz.

Not only does this let customers easily give you kudos, the testimonials you receive may provide great tools to help you tell your story in newsletters, annual reports, board reports and more. Testimonials also show staff that their good work and service is noticed and appreciated, so be sure to share them.

At OhioLINK, we post stories from our users on our news site as well as our testimonials page. This idea was highly inspired by Google's Press Center. There is also a form to submit stories online and once a year we encourage our member libraries to help us find great testimonials for our annual report. Having these testimonials easily accessible and available to all makes them much more useful for us and our members.