Ett biblioteks servicescape

Servicescape, bibliotek

Inför detta blogginlägg passade jag på att besöka vår stads bibliotek eftersom jag alltid har svårt att hitta där.
Miljön är överlag ett virrvarr för mig. Skyltar i entrén pekar bland annat mot skötbord, "Kulan" (vad är det?) och toaletter. Det finns en större skylt med en karta över biblioteket, men den skylten är inte lätt att hitta.
Böcker finns på många olika ställen. Vissa är sorterade på sitt eget sätt, som kräver att man känner till det sedan tidigare eller bara snubblar över det i förbifarten; modell "Nobelhyllan" eller "Kulturrådets bokhylla" (vad är det?)
Väl bland skönlitteraturen upphör merparten av skyltarna och jag kan leta i ganska förutsägbar bokstavsordning. Om det inte är en biografi jag söker, för då finns de på våning två.
Det är inte lätt för mig att röra mig intuitivt på biblioteket, kort och gott. Mycket kräver en förkunskap om både koncept, förkortningar och böckers innehåll.

Till saken hör att jag verkligen gillar att läsa och alltså är en motiverad kund. Bitner (1992) skriver om att varje individ kommer till en organisation med ett syfte och att detta, tillsammans med mycket annat, påverkar upplevelsen. För min del bistår inte bibliotekets fysiska servicescape särskilt väl till att uppnå mina mål. Jag har stor lust att ge mig därifrån, men stannar jag kvar med en osalig känsla i kroppen tills jag hittat några böcker.  Min positiva kundupplevelse ligger inte i själva besöket på biblioteket utan i själva läsupplevelsen jag får någon annanstans. Att jag tycker det är så positivt att få låna böcker väger, precis som Bitner beskriver, upp min generella negativa upplevelse. Så jag återvänder och lånar nya böcker.

Det är inte lätt att skapa en positivt stödjande miljö som är så komplex utifrån dess olika användare och syften. På biblioteket, som är en "detaljerad" (elaborated) miljö enligt Bitner, finns självservice, fjärrservice (min favorit) och interpersonell service. Det ställer mycket stora krav på utformningen.

Nyligen fick jag reda på att biblioteket fått 2 miljoner kr extra i sin budget för nästa år. Det är min förhoppning att man använder delar av dessa pengar till att samla in  synpunkter från bibliotekets olika användare och nyttja det i utvecklingsarbetet av servicescapen. Detaljerade observationer av besökarnas beteende och statistik på antal lånade böcker skulle dessutom kunna ge intressant vägledning om det finns möjligheter att utveckla en yta som ändå bidrar till mycket positivt i vårt samhälle.




Referens; Mary Jo Bitner, Journal of Marketing, april 1992

Since I assume that most participants in the course speek Swedish, I will write in Swedish instead. If I am all wrong - tell me, and I will switch to English again. 😊

Videon "Physical Evidence and the Servicescape" av Brian Wilson, ger mig onekligen tankar om hur vår servicescape ser ut för våra spontanbesökande krögare. När de väl tagit sig upp för en lång trappa kommer de (flämtande) till en slags hall där två pelarbord står tillsammans med höga pallar. Intill finns våra postfack, en trött TV-skärm där nyheter löper på en textremsa och ett tomt tidningsställ. Allt finns direkt utanför en av chefernas stora kontor, dit dörren oftast är öppen.
Jag har varit rätt nöjd med den där lösningen, eftersom tanken är att den ska signalera "kort och koncist möte" till spontanbesökande krögare och även min personal. De krögare som bokat tid får däremot komma in bakom kulisserna, där bekvämare möbler och miljö finns och mer tid erbjuds.

Frågan som väcks hos mig, efter att ha tittat på videon, är vad denna lilla mottagningsyta faktiskt säger om oss. Att det ska gå fort är nog tydligt, men vilken upplevelse ger den i övrigt?

Brian Wilson beskriver värdet av att aktivt arbeta med sin servicescape för att den ska bidra till en positiv kund- och personalupplevelse, där den fysiska miljön fungerar som ett stöd i den riktningen. Han avslutar med en vägledning för arbetet. (se bild)

Jag inser att vår trista hall inte förmedlar det jag vill, annat än att den anspelar på snabba möten. Men jag lär behöva se över vilka signaler vi faktiskt ger och fundera på vad vi kanske behöver ändra för att ge ett tydligare budskap om vad vi vill förmedla.

Expectations on module 5, costumers experience room

This time, I can´t make up my mind if I will find this module interesting or not. Will the focus on the costumers and employees experience room be too detailed to tickle me? Or will I find new ways to improve my work and the expectations and experiences of our service?

At the moment I am a bit full, having so many new impressions from this course, areas to develop at work related to what we already have learned . Will it be possible to reload?
I hope so. Or, I think so. It is a bit uphill at the moment, but when I dive into the subject, I know I will be captured by my curiosity.

Bitners text (Journal of Marketing, april 1992) is is interesting: what behaviors would we like to achieve with our servicescape? How is our servicescape created today? Is it supporting our goals?

I think I will have interesting discussions at home as well during this module, as I am living with a HR-manager who has the employees perspective near at hand.

So: onwards and upwards!

Expectations module 3, bribe and reciprocation

During this module I expect to get tools to understand and analyze the influencing strategies before and during a purchase, or - for me - when costumers are using our service. I´m looking forward to read Cialdinis book and be inspired to how I can develop our service, making our costumers more satisfied.

Cialdinis text about reciprocation (2014) makes me think of how strongly the law is supposed to protect us officers from bribe. The lawmaker is well aware of the power of reciprocation. I hope to be able to reflect more about that during this module: is my unit free from obligations due to reciprocation? Probably not. I have to find out how, to be able to make sure that we act fairly.

__________________________

Robert B Cialdini, 2014, Fifth edition, Influence, Science and Practice

Karma is a bitch?

"When tools are used unethically as weapons of influence, any short-term gain will almost invariably be followed by long-term loss" (Prof Cialdini)

This quote by Prof Cialdini makes me remember a dinner I had in Dubrovnik. We came to the town for just a short visit and needed something to eat. There was this very cosy-looking restaurant, obviously for tourists, but we were hungry and it seemed so nice. So we sat down and had our meal, which was horrible. It was made for guests that would not come back. And we didn't.
The owner made some profit from our visit. But we told everyone not to go there, and did for sure not return either the next time we arrived to the town.

I like honesty and an authentic relationship. This will make me a faithful costumer and this will increase the profit for the vendor.

So, karma is not a bitch. And professor Cialdinis book will be very interesting to read.

Professor Margareta Friman speaks in a video "Quality. The object of desire" about perceived or objective quality and its relation to satisfaction.

Quality is performance related to some kind of relevant standard. It doesn´t require any experience of consumption. It is primarily cognitive and has fewer conceptual antecedents compared to satisfaction. It also has a durability and a signal of excellence
Satisfaction is a short term fenomen that is based on experience. It has many dimensions and is based on cognitive and affective response.
Quality and satisfaction can be experienced at the same time; you can have a satisfying experience in a high quality business.

I like when my costumers are satisfied with our service. But we have vague ideas about why they actually are satisfied or not.
We have done a lot of work defining the signs of our core values. These values are related to our service - how we behave, create value, lead ourselves and collaborate with our costumers.
When our service is measured, we are rated high related to this.
But our index for efficiency, which we actually have not made that explicit standards for, is much lower, especially from our new costumers. Not a coincidence, I think.

New costumers expectations are unknown for us. But if we manage to improve our quality and give excellent service, we can influence and enhance the expectations of our service. Professor Pedersen says in his video that expectations has a dominant effect of your evaluation, especially when the product (our service) is hard to evaluate.

Finally. Just playing with words, the difference between "good" or "skilful" might just be a bit similar to satisfaction or high quality. When I´m good, I just do my best. That is satisfying but a bit chancy, But when I´m skilful, I know what the best standard is and I do that.

Have to go now... Must work with our standars for efficiency. ;)

Sorry, you who don´t speak Swedish, but this is an interesting article from Svenska Dagbladet about teachers expectations on students. Your find it here

Just a few quotes (my translation, maybe at bit poor...):
"To enduringly enhance the quality of the university collage, we must enhance our expectations and the responsibility of the students, doctoral students and faculty."

"As teachers, we find that when we enhance our expectations, the students will perform better"

This article is interesting for me in many ways, but to choose only one focus, I think of one link in our process with my restauteurs. They are interacting with my administrators, eg when they have to account for how they finance the purchase of their restaurant. We have low expectations on our costumers considering this, and they often respond inadequate to our demands.
This is a serious problem, as it lengthens the investigation  and the costs for our clients as they can´t start their business selling alcohol until they have our sanction.

So what if we enhance our demands on our clients (more probably: on ourselves)? This might be one way to achieve higher satisfaction for our costumers.

Improving service for new costumers?

As I wrote in my second blog post, I work as a head of a municipal unit that investigates and supervise restaurants that sell or would like to sell alcohol. The restaurateurs are our "visible" client, but, as Professor Friman said during her first webinar, we have many other kinds of costumers:  a vertical line from the restaurant-owner to the politicians, the industry and commerce and finally the public, whose health we are ment to protect with the alcohol-law. The system has a built-in conflict with many different aims depending on what focus you have .

Anyhow: we measure our restaurant-owners satisfaction with our service.  The others  -  the politicians, our supervisors and sometimes the public - tell us what they think about our work.
The restaurateurs are asked about their experience of our treatment, our legal security, our fees and our efficiency. We rate high on almost everything apart from efficiency. Here, our new costumers find us more inefficient. We don´t know their expectations about our service, as we never measure that.
Our returning costumers are more satisfied, they rate our efficiency higher.

It has been hard work changing the restaurateurs opinion about our work and we still have a way to go.
According to Professor Friman, Professor Pedersen and the article by Richard L. Oliver (A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions), there must be a major disconfirmation to change the costumer experience if it is different compared to his expectations.

Probably, our returning costumers, have different expectation from when they first contacted us.
We need to change our new costumers experience of our service. I do agree that we have to improve our efficiency, but how do we work with their expectations of our service?

I hope that this course will give me tools to understand this better.

Alcohol, speedbumps and expectations

I am Gunilla, who has been longing to understand more about my costumers experiences, in this case, the restaurateurs, in my town. I work as a head of a municipal unit that investigates and supervise restaurants that sell or would like to sell alcohol.
Our work is not always popular among our clients and we do have to work hard to offer service that our clients appreciate. The value of our service is not always experienced within our work, it is beyond it. You need "our" licence to run your pub and you have to pass through the laws needle´s eye to get it, a k a lots of administration, a thing that many clients really dislike. Our unit is a bit like a speedbump on the road for the restaurateurs. Though, I like this speedbump, as it has its roots in a protective law that will make our town nightlife safer and the public health better. And for the restaurateurs, it offers a fair competition, which of course is very important.
With our work comes great power, and like superman, we have to show great responsibility. The contact with our unit is imperative for our clients, so it is even more important to make the contact as good as possible.

For many years we have improved our service by intuition or by, which I find most important, listening to our clients. Though this is not enough. I need more knowledge and theories to understand our clients experiences so that I can improve and develop our service and our work. I hope the course will help me with this.

I have a background and a degree as a social worker since many years, especially working with preventive interventions against abuse of drugs and alcohol.  My experience of social media is not very big, just using Facebook, Instagram and Pintrest.

Now I look forward to the first module, though I am a bit worried about my English. No doubt, I will not only improve my knowledge about psychological aspects behind costumers experiences, I will also improve my English. Killing two birds with one stone, great value! :)

Nybörjare X2

Äntligen igång! Så här glad blir jag när jag fått ordning på allt det praktiska med att börja en distanskurs på Karlstads universitet. Nu vill jag lära mig allt - eller i alla fall väldigt mycket - om hur kunder uppfattar våra tjänster på Helsingborgs tillståndsenhet, där jag är chef. 

I övermorgon börjar kunskapsresan och jag är så taggad!