My name is Jennifer Peterson and I'm really excited that you're here today.
I have a couple of things to mention before I have Pat get us started.
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I'm going to go ahead and get our recording started and welcome our present R today.
We're so excited to be working with Pat Wagner.
She comes to us from the lovely state of Colorado and we've had so many opportunities to work with Pat in the past.
She has great insights and experience related to the topic of customer service and we know that you're going to benefit greatly from the great ideas she has to share today.
So, welcome, Pat, and thank you so much for being here.
>> Pat Wagner:  Jennifer, thank you so much and thanks to the WebJunction staff and I see a lot of people I know in the audience, which is kind of fun.
For those of you who don't know me, I've been a consultant and trainer for libraries and I spend a lot of time on the road working with libraries.
The work is not theory for me, this is practice.
And I talk about things that I see and hear that actually work for libraries of all sizes from rural storefronts to some of the biggest urban academic public and special libraries in the country, as well as school libraries as well.
I was thinking about what is it that I've done that would address how we deal with customer service excellence particular after this, let's say, pretty exciting year in 2016?
And I do have a background in community organizing in both city and rural areas.
But I also think that one of the things that has really helped me understand these issues is I had the privilege of being born and raised in the south side of Chicago, in the high park district, the is the neighborhood that President Obama is from.
It was culturally diverse by every single idea that you could have in terms of socioeconomic status.
So, diversity and dealing with different people with very different ideas about the world were basically the norm in effect.
And I think that just got into my DNA.
When we talk about customer service, we talk about customer service for everybody.
And most of the clients I work with are already really great at customer service and libraries and we think that there are new challenges that some people, and some institutions and communities are facing.
And the key idea, in all the programs I do have a key idea.
Is to evolve and sutain a welcoming library consistently for all people.
So we're going to spend a little time talking about the roles that people take on in the library and in fact that success is based on everyone participating.
What the welcoming library is and the fact that it involves planning and, you know, some people say, well, we really want to show people we have a welcoming library, who are putting up a sign that says, we're a welcoming library.
That is a little bit of what happens.
We're going to talk about the ethics and four standards of ethical behavior.
We'll talk also about collection, services, programming and staffing and how PORPT it is.
A little bit about the physical environment and I have to say, this is a personal issue for me because as I get older, I see that I feel -- and I mean, I don't use a wheelchair, I don't use a cane, but there are more and more issues that might make it more and more difficult for people in your community to feel welcome.
And then we're going to talk about next steps.
And I really -- during this program -- want you to think about the idea of evolution.
So, we're going to be giving you specific examples.
We're going to be giving you some exercises to take back to your library, which are questions to ask with staff and the input of your customers and your leadership and some ideas that we think really help them focus.
I would say, right now, particularly in the last four or five years, this kind of customer service program is the most popular program that I'm being asked to present on and facilitate in libraries.
So, the first thing is, our roles.
And, when we talk about the roles, we mean that particularly in smaller libraries, people pay attention to different things.
You might have a job description that tells you to do something, but unfortunately, once in a while -- I know it doesn't apply to anyone here -- I will get a phone call or email for someone who says we're having special customer service challenges here in our library, I want you to come up and work with the frontline staff and I want you to come out and work with circulation, reference, ya, children's.
I have to say to the person, that's great.
I also need to meet with the board, the director, the managers, the supervisors, the volunteers.
The friends group.
Any community liaisons.
They say, we're just talking about what happens maybe at a front service desk and I said, that's only one facet.
So, what we need to understand is that that idea of service excellence is what everybody does, but depending on what hat you're wearing, you may have a different role.
Now, I kind of packed the slides with a lot of information, but we're only going to hit one highlight per roll.
And as I go through this, I might even ask you to -- to share with the audience, which of these roles you take on.
And I bet that most of the people watching this have different formal roles in their library, multiple of hats that they wear.
And we're going from a very standard model, leadership, management, supervision, staff and internal customer service.
We have the leadership and the leadership of the library are the people who -- the ultimate financial and legal responsibility for the library lies in their hands and it can be everybody from the director to community representatives.
The people who are in leadership have to be people who are, let's say, courageous enough to step forward in their communities and institutions and champion what the library is doing.
Humans are funny.
You can put up a sign that says, we welcome everyone.
And someone in your community is going to find it controversial.
You may find, there's a lot of groundwork that has to be done in terms of connecting with groups and organizations.
Reaching out to people who you haven't talked to before.
So, how men  many of the folks would say one of the hats you wear is that of leadership?
Again, if you are in that leadership role in your library, championing, being out there and not only promoting advocacy, but being able to step forward and use your personal and professional influence to help people understand the importance of this idea, that's a big part.
When someone like myself comes out to talk about customer service, I always ask -- I do it politely -- to meet with the director, the board, the trustees, the administration team.
Anyone who might be said to be in a leadership role to discuss these kinds of issues, as well.
The second part is management.
Management, again, if you're a director of a small library, you're probably also a manager.
You may be what we call an accidental manager when you're sharp and you're smart and competent and suddenly, you're in charge of a big project and you wake up a manager.
And actually, you know, you get a big car and the extra raise and everything.
We can have a joke there.
In the issue of customer service excellence, those managers are the ones -- you'll hear me say this over and over today -- 
maintain consistency, communicating between departments, among branches and buildings and projects to say, we're all on the same page.
So that if I was a patron at your library and I visited different branches or visited the library on a Monday and a Saturday, I would get a consistent high-level of community service.
There would be that connection that I would feel I was well taken care of and there wouldn't be one kind of service I would get on a Monday morning, when everybody's there, versus a Saturday afternoon when maybe the administrative offices are closed.
Almost think of it as like a telephone system, wires going through the library, connecting people and making sure that everybody is on the same page.
Obviously, if you are creating a plan for customer excellence, all of those managers need to be on the same page.
We have supervision.
The different between management is supervision is the size of the project or scale.
If you directly supervise anybody else -- you also evaluate that person -- you're a supervisor.
And supervisors have just about the most important role in maintaining high-quality customer service in a library because you are the folks who are constantly educating and using healthy, positive reinforcement in getting people to understand what's important and guiding people and sometimes, it's just like a little tweak, a tap on the shoulder, a reminder.
You're also about maintaining those consistent standards between days, between shifts.
And if you folks use part-timers, which a lot of my libraries use because of local demographics, for finances and everything, boy, one of the hardest things is to maintain that consistency among people who might only be there 10, 15, 20 hours a week.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Pat, I'm going to jump in, too, because someone posted to chat, what about volunteers?
>> Pat Wagner:  Thank you.
And, volunteers -- this is great, Jennifer.
In the nonprofit world, the nonprofit world figured out, in the 1960s, that volunteers need to be treated just like employees.
And there's a lot of libraries who haven't caught up with that concept yet and one of the resources I mention is the John whiley publications that are absolutely the best on nonprofit management and most of the books they have, even if they don't specifically suggest libraries, are about that.
So, that's my short thing.
Of anybody who walks in and there's legal and ethical reasons why you have to treat them like volunteers.
I'll tell you the hard part is when you have a separate agency, like a friends group, which is an independent nonprofit organizations, and they have their volunteers working in the library where technically you don't have legal supervision with them.
You have to work that out beforehand.
the rule of thumb is if somebody comes into your library to work, they fall under your customer service standards.
So, do I believe in firing volunteers?
You bet ya.
Good question.
Thank you.
So, this issue of education and positive reinforcement and supervision is key.
When we're talking about improving, refining customer service, yeah, we basically are relying on that partnership between employees and their supervisors to get the job then.
And then we have the staff, who are cheerful, smart, willing to work long hours for lousy pay.
[LAUGHTER]
And they're where the rubber hits the road.
And the  basic idea is that external customer service.
If you're someone who was serving -- directly serving a customer, that should be the number one item in your job description and your number one priority, regardless of anything else and that includes a lot of people who say, I'm really smart in IT, do I have to be pleasant to people?
I've actually had people say that to me and I go, yeah, you do.
For those of you who are staff, this is all -- you know -- your every day thing.
For some people, they may think because they're a supervisor or a manager or director, customer service doesn't impact them.
The truth is, it's all part of the same -- of the same ecology in the library.
And then, finally -- this is a topic that is brought up almost every library I visit.
Internal customer service, meaning how we treat each other.
And, if you treat each other very well -- if there is respect and courtesy, good manners among people.
If information is given clearly and consistency and it's a place to work that you want to recommend to other people, that is certainly going to infect -- 
in the best sense of the world -- what the environment is there.
If there are problems in that issues, often, I will say this needs to be fixed first.
You need to have a place where you have a good communication and people are treated with courtesy because customers have radar and they are very much attuned to what's going on in any institution.
And I bet you, you can think of times that you visited a store, for example, and you could tell that the staff didn't really like each other much.
So, let me pause here a second and see, Jennifer, if we have a couple of questions or ideas that came up.
Again, we aren't able to get to your question during the period, you are very welcome, at no charge, to contact me by email after the program and we will be giving you all my contact information and you won't be getting a sales pitch.
Do we have anything, Jennifer?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  I want to acknowledge, there was a lot of excellent conversation in terms of folks that are leading in different roles and, you know, sort of non-defined manager roles, stepping in and out of those leadership roles.
Some pointed out that that may be the case, especially in more collaborative environments.
Others -- somebody mentioned, would we not all be leaders in some fashion when we do outreach?
I think that folks that are working on cross-multiple branches, they relationship changes depending on which branch they're in.
I think there's a lot of different -- we heard from folks that are dealing with volunteers, as well.
So, I think that's important to recognize and I'm a huge advocate of accidental leadership or even leadership when we don't know we're being leaders, I think, is really important, as well.
So, I just wanted to acknowledge a lot of that.
And I did mention -- the thing about webinars is they always surface all these other topics we could spend a whole other hour on.
I did direct folks to some excellent resources on mangeing, sometimes difficult, volunteers.
It's not just a matter of people wearing different hats at different times, but how those roles lead into each other and how people take responsibility.
>> Pat Wagner:  I'm very much for collaboration.
it's who calls the mayor for championing.
Who calls the head of the legislative committee?
Who's the person who's expected to have the legal authority to face down the district attorney when the district attorney walks into a meeting and decides they're going to arrest someone who's speaking out?
It's different from -- in my view, it's different when I use this term, in this context, not just how we communicate as a well-oiled team, but also, the role of that person or persons, like the trustees, who have the legal authority to basically communicate -- I'm going to use the p word, I hope no one's offended, the practical politics of what goes on, as well.
When we see libraries being successful at making sif KNT changes in terms of excellence customer service, when there's a crisis or challenge in the institution, you see there is a leader or a group of leaders and that we can really count on those folks stepping up and that's a hard role for some people, as well.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  Yeah, I think that's a great thing to emphasize.
>> Pat Wagner:  That different role, as well.
We'll be stopping in a few minutes, again.
Let's take a look at this idea of what The Welcoming Library.
For me, The Welcoming Library is the same thing as you're creating a physical and emotional space that people feel good about.
There's lots of ways to go about it.
It's everything from, you know, what the place looks like, physically, to people's behavior.
And all the different other components.
But you know, it's kind of like we live in central Denver in an older neighborhood, we have a bungalow that's about 110 years old.
Modest.
We have a lot of books.
And I think a lot because of clients and friends visiting us, to make the place nice and friendly.
And you know, there's a couple of details that make a difference.
For example, we have the kind of furniture -- we have cat, dirt-colored furniture.
We think that's very important.
But, when we were, like, remodeling our home a few years ago, some of the things we emphasized is we want a place where people can put their feet up on the furniture and people are relaxed and they feel safe and comfortable.
I have friends with taste and they have money and beautiful homes, but it's like walking into a museum.
I visit 50 to 100 libraries a year and it's very interesting how people define that welcoming library.
Here are five ideas -- this is what I'd like you to do, I'd like you to think about these five ideas in terms of how well you're thinking today.
Then we're going to quickly revisit them, at the end of the hour, to say, is there something for each of these ideas that you can do a small step you can take to improve them?
For example, consistency.
And consistency, in this, is about the fact that everyone gets treated the same, regardless of who they are.
That -- we'll talk more about that.
Safety for the stranger is an idea that comes out of the Magna Carta and from western civilization.
How do you grow beyond the family and the tribe so the person who is most different from you is treated absolutely the same way as a long-time friend?
This is one of the reasons that companies like WALT Disney spend so much time on frontline customer service so that everyone gets that great experience, regardless of who they are.
The details count and the details, again, is how do we treat people?
Everyone gets that.
That small, the welcome.
One library I worked with said they had done some experiments and they decided that the smile and say, good-bye, thank you for coming, come back, is as important as saying hello.
And my rule of thumb is, everyone who works in the library, if they can say, good  -- if they can't say hello, good morning, good-bye, they shouldn't be working there.
Seeing customers as allies and I do a lot of projects with marketing with libraries and they'll ask me questions, like what color the brochures should be, what language they should be.
I say, don't ask me.
Ask your customers.
They know the world.
They can put themselves in the shoes of people just like them.
And then finally, that we take this seriously.
We write these ideas into our plans.
We take complaints seriously.
And we don't just smile and say, oh, thank you for sharing your opinion, blah, blah, blah.
But people know that we take action and we have follow-through.
So what would be some examples?
Again, I come back to everyone's treated with the same courtesy and sometimes -- and I've experienced this myself, standing in line on a busy circday and I'll watch the faces of the people who are waiting on us, who are busy, good people and you know you can sometimes unfortunately tell what they think of the person they're waiting on.
And if I'm a new person in town and I'm standing behind somebody who has been there awhile or is different in some way, I'm going to be very sensatized to the difference between between how they're treated and how I'm treated.
If you have library customers and visitors to the library who are from minority groups or groups that have a history of feeling marginalized, they're going to have extra antenna.
I happen to be from an immigrant family and I've heard stories over the years and how important it was for my mother, whose third language was English, of the courtesy and respect she was treated and even as a senior citizen, that was something that was important to her.
Safety for the stranger is that no matter how different you are, when you walk into the library, maybe you're a different demographic from the people behind the counter.
Maybe there's only a few of, quote, you in that community.
Nonetheless, when you walk in, you know you're going to get that same, great treatment.
The details count, we smile at everyone.
I don't mean a big, goofy, stupid, smile.
The kind of, oh, my goodness, you'veyou've come into a place that I cherish.
Partnering with customers is we ask for advice.
There are people I meet in library land who will not talk to customers to get their input about things like collection.
They only want to talk to another degreed professional and that whole idea of we take things seriously.
We write down complaints.
We provide a deadline for responses.
If there's something very specific that you've done, a program you can describe in a few words about how you've partnered with customers to get their input, that would be interesting.
Or any of the things you've done that you feel have worked really well to reach out to people when there is a difference between the demographics of the people belined  hind the counter and in front of the counter.
So, the big picture is that it needs to be a written priority, customer service is a priority that appears in the strategic plan.
Appears in written ideas.
And even if you have a very small library, it's saying that we think this is so important that we write about it and we talk about it and by doing that, we hold ourselves accountable.
It's not just a platitude.
This is what we're going to do and this is how we're going to do it, which I think is kind of important.
the thing is that no matter how much you plan, then you have the execution and I really love the idea of being very concrete about what you're going to do to welcome people.
It doesn't matter what their background is, who they are, that they're going to feel good when they walk into the library and that execution, I think, is sometimes where we fall down because we don't spend enough time saying, what is it that we're actually going to do?
What would be the physical evidence that we're a welcoming library?
One of the exercises that I sometimes do with people, little thought exercise, is have them design -- this would be a group of library people -- have them design a department store that welcomes children.
Or, a restaurant that is particularly welcoming to people who use wheelchairs or canes or a park that is welcoming to seniors.
And I tell pepeople, just the details, like you're the person who's the stage manager for the play, every detail.
And we talk about how those transfer to libraries.
We want to make sure, too, that it's not just the frontline staff, as we talked about before, having to do with the roles.
That everybody who works, every supervisor or manager comes back to the idea of what are we doing this for?
Why are we doing this?
And that execution happens when you hold people accountable.
There's too much, on every library's plate, you folks have too much to do, you don't have enough people.
And I have not found many people in library land good at saying no.
You wake up in the morning and by 10:00, you have 50 new great ideas of unmet needs that have to be done and this is where I think we really have to prioritize and say, we need the time to do these things, what does good customer service mean?
It means communication, what we call management overhead.
So, this idea that it's a priority for every supervisor or manager is asking ourselves, how is what I am doing improving the customer service experience?
Or is it behind the scenes, they may or may not improve the experience that people have in the library?
This is one of the exercises that we have listed in the learning guide.
I do encourage you to use this as a tool.
Make copies of it.
Have different people use it.
Just an example, what would be two or three words that you might use that would describe a welcoming library?
What would be something that you would say, what a welcoming library is?
And by the way, I think this is one of the most important exercises that a staff can do, everybody can do, because people will have different ideas about what a welcoming library is and this means something specific to you, your community and the people you serve.
This is one of those old -- we used to call them plus delta exercises -- we want to make sure that we capture what the library is already doing.
I think it's a great exercise to have people reflect on.
Hey, we're doing this and that.
Bragging -- I like libraries to brag about what they're doing.
If you say, hey, here's a cool thing we're doing that adds to the idea of a welcoming library, please share this with the group.
And, in thinking about it, what's something where you would want to raise your score a little bit?
You say, here's what a welcoming library is.
Here's all the great stuff we're already doing.
What can we do to do a little bit better about things?
For me, it's killing the dust bunnies under the couches.
[LAUGHTER]
so, talking about ethics, I happen to teach ethics in libraries and I think it's an important part of customer service.
We're going to talk about ethics and the four standards of ethics and behaviors.
Ethics is the study of right and wrong and morality.
It's sort of like codes that sometimes that go back centuries of things that are really important in terms of how we treat people.
So what I'd like to do is share these four ideas with you -- and I think you'll see how they connect with what we've been talking about -- and then give you specific examples about these.
If you have examples related to any of these four, this would be a great time to chime in on the chat.
So, these four ideas from library ethics -- and by the way, it's not like there's only one set of ethical codes or ethical ideas.
There's many, many different ones.
But these are four that I use a lot in my work.
We have the fairness.
That means people are treated the same in the library, regardless of their status, their wealth, their title, their power, how long they've lived in the library, no matter what their status is in the food chain of academia.
Access, everyone has access to the information available and that touches on everything about big-type books to, are the computers adjustable?
How easy it is for people to get information to do what they need to do?
Transparency.
And my goal is regardless of where you live in the United States, particularly United States or Canada, every state, every province has the "Open meeting" or the sunshine laws.
If you're not a public sector library, still to look at those "Open meeting" laws as the basis for understanding the importance of transparency.
On the other hand, the privacy issue is really important so that people don't feel intimidated and that the right, to this is what I want to read, this is what I want to study and this is what I want to look at is respected for everyone.
So, how does this translate?
Well, for one thing, is the fairness rule that in my world, there are no exceptions for friends and relatives or long-time library users that exempt them from the rules of the library.
If you're late bringing the book back and you work at the library, you pay a fine.
When I'm doing an ethical audit of the library, that's one of the questions I ask.
Some people get a little irritated with me for talking about this.
It's the, what is fair?
The access.
Remember in the olden days, where there were libraries that there were certain books that were behind the counter?
But the way that we do it these days is -- I know this is going to shock you -- some libraries have unofficial private holds protocols, meaning that if you're a special purpose who is known and liked at the library and new best-sellers is coming in and the waiting list is 150, secretly, unknown to other people, your name gets pulled and you get the book and it's behind the counter and you have access to it.
We're going to save this for you.
If I'm running a clothing store in the private sector, I can do that for my best customers.
If I'm running a public sector agency, everyone has access to the same access.
Transparency, that the meetings you hold publicly, you think about transportation for people without cars and there's a lot of people in the working class that have jobs and they can't get off to attend a meeting or attend an event.
You work with your customers and say, what are the things we can do to make sure that the decisions we make are made in such a way that people have access to that information?
And, I realized when I wrote this last one about privacy, it is like, staff does not gossip about unpopular customers.
Okay, can we gossip gossip about the popular customers?
No.
We have a tendanies to say, did you see the book that person has?
It is not done with ILL-will.
Getting people to understand that privacy also starts with respecting the privacy of the people that are checking out books and that gossiping about them is basically violating that person's privacy, something we should respect, as well.
So here's kind of a little chart that I use to think about some of these issues and then we're going to pause after we do this and I'll check back in with Jennifer and see if people have some questions or comments, at this point.
And it's about what we call the unintentional different standards.
And I see too many libraries -- 
and these are great places with great people, but people are tired and you're overworked, so we sometimes fall into bad habits, where there's a [Indiscernible] of our behavior so we end up having one standard of how we treat people for people we know versus one for people we don't know.
We have one standard for people we like.
And then a different one for people we don't like.
Personally or oh, my goodness, I don't like -- I had one library in California where the librainian decided she didn't like young men who wore sunglasses indoors and she would tell them she wouldn't wait on them until they took them off.
That's a lawsuit waiting to happen and very disrespectful to the men.
One for people who look and talk like us and one for people who don't look and talk like us.
This is self-awareness about consistency.
The more you practice having a consistent service, the word is going to go out into a whole bunch of communities, go to the library, they'll treat you fairly.
Jennifer, let's pause here.
Does the audience have some questions or comments you'd like to share?
>> Jennifer Peterson:  There's been some interesting and tough issues surfacing in chat and I really appreciate people being frank and honest and I love to see suggestions shared.
A couple of the scenarios, early on when you were talking about flexibility and consistency -- 
actually, first with the safety for the stranger concept.
There have been patrons confidentconfidently declaring their political opinions for all to hear and this person said, well, we haven't had any complaints yet, but I'm wondering, how do we frame that?
There were folks that jumped in and said, maybe this is an opportunity for creating ground rules.
I know you talk about policies.
Then, some other conversation around -- especially maybe with the teens.
There have been some discussions of politics, often civil with the teens.
I think teens are pretty good at this, actually.
But in terms of addressing that, within the library environment, I'm curious if you've heard how folks are dealing with this currently?
>> Pat Wagner:  Again, this is like when you hire me in for the eight-hour webinar because I like to be specific.
Here's two ideas.
First of all, let's be honest about how often these events happen?
It is human nature to tend to exaggerate this.
If it's only a couple of people, building some kind of rapport and smiling and saying, thank you for sharing, and then changing the subject.
You know?
To something interesting.
Maybe even if it's that old Mr. Smith with his ideas.
Find out a little bit a lot what's interesting.
Ask him for suggestions for books, some authors, some magazines.
At the very least, you can listen, smile and say, thank you and then do whatever you need to do to move the person through the surface line about stuff.
You don't have to get attached, you know, kind of hooked in to what the conversation is, as well.
So, there's a couple of quickie ideas.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Excellent, that's great.
Somewhat related to the fairness and consistency piece.
It's certainly difficult to balance all of the expectations of all of the users, how do you find the tipping point when customers complain about something before you find it necessary to act -- I know you'll talk about getting the customer input on some of those decisions, so perhaps that will touch on how to approach that tipping point.
Definitely some other stories --
everyone was, you know, certainly jarred by your story of the behind the desk preference.
Someone said we have a friend who expects that special treatment, so again, an opportunity to emphasize, well, this is the policy that we have in place for access to all.
>> Pat Wagner:  Sure.
Let me take the last one, first, real quick.
Let's pretend you're in a small town and you find out, when you go to the your doctor's office, a couple of people get special privileges.
You're there on time with three kids and someone pushes their way in front of you because they're a friend of a friend and there was a long line at the bank and people were getting waved to the front and you say, wait a minute, who are these privileged characters?
Why are that getting privileges that I'm not?
It's worse with a public sector agency.
Sometimes we have those conversations, if we know the person personally, away from the library.
You say, I have a job and I know I can count on you for your support.
This is where the code of ethics of what we do in a public sector agency collides with the, what do we do for friends?
Again, nepotism is great in the private sector and I love hiring people's brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles.
Public sector?
No.
It's a different model.
You find people say, there's an old boys network and an old girls network and if you didn't go to this particular grade school, no one will talk to you.
You have to be this kind of person.
They're part of the establishment, they don't care about people like me.
Growing up in Chicago, I mean --
[LAUGHTER]
Got to feel a lot of that, as well.
In terms of any kind of service in the level of complaints, this is why managers and supervisors work together to collect information from the front staff so whatever decisions are made are with an overview of, my goodness, does this just happen on Saturday mornings?
One quick one, before we continue, is I had a library -- 
in a fairly wealthy suburb in the Midwest, they had to have me come in because they some really angry, upset patrons who were just really difficult.
Well, by the time we deconstructed what was going on, it was three, little, old ladies that would come together.
Humans tend to complain a lot, about a lot of things.
At the end of the day, what is decided is decided with input and oversight by a lot of different people.
It's not one person saying, I'm hearing all these complaints, I'm annoyed and this is what I'm going to do.
We do that so it's consistent and the library has your back.
That you're not out there, hanging out, having to set a difficult boundary or saying thou shall not pass with someone.
You're representing the whole library.
Again, folks, feel free to email me and we'll see what we can do.
So, the idea of welcoming is you don't necessarily have to be formal.
We're not talking about necessarily a formal process.
But we are talking about human behavior.
And this gets kind of difficult for some people.
I naturally have a look on my face that looks angry and angry.
[LAUGHTER]
I have learned to fix this so I don't scare the horses.
So, there's some people who really don't think that they have to smile at people when they walk up.
That they don't pay attention to things like the tone of their voice.
The pace of the interaction that we spend more time with people we like than we don't like and the same thing with the thoroughness of our responses.
This becomes a self-awareness.
You don't do this alone, you do this as a group.
I've heard amazing stories from libraries at conferences and so on in rural Nebraska and rural Kansas from participants saying, we started paying attention to these things and people at the front desk starting smiling and saying good morning and we saw an amazing difference in how people were responding.
So, it doesn't have to be robotic, but it's basically kind of like what happens in a marriage or a partnership, sometimes we get a little slack and when we sort of up our game back, it's amazing how people respond positively.
Again.
Now, this is another exercise that we're suggesting for the learning guide.
To really think about this idea of customers and it's not just having the advisory board that meets once a year, but really how are we interacting with people?
I think the point of this is that sometimes we are only talking to our most popular customers, the ones who love the library, who come in all the time, who are articulate, probably they're college-educated, they're great readers.
But we should also be reaching out into the community to people who don't show up and find out why they don't show up, to go to different community groups, church groups, social services.
Sometimes what we're going to find out is not going to make us comfortable.
If we're really talking about customer service excellence for everyone, the biggest danger, Jennifer, is for us to get a little smug.
This exercise, here, is part of that conversation that I hope people have.
So, then we have this.
And this is going to be pretty simple, talking about the collections, the services, the programs and the staffing.
And again, what we're remembering is, we are going to partner in decision-making with the people in our community.
So, we have -- I mean, I made this very simple.
We have what we acquire, what we offer, and who we hire.
So, for our collections, a very easy thing is to get people involved withal book choices and we did a project a few years ago in New Jersey with a library in a community with a large Chinese-American population and actually created an event on the weekend for people from that community to come in so that the collection was not being developed in isolation from the community itself and what was interesting is the people in the community were so flattered, they didn't just show up with book suggestions and books, they showed up with their checkbooks and said, you honor us by involving us in this decision-making and ended up writing checks for the library, as well.
Asking people, since libraries do everything these days, what do you need from us that you can't get somewhere else?
Is it advice on communication?
I know a library in Washington state is very famous for developing a whole program that came out of the needs for a place for people in the community who were developing chronic hearing problems to be able to meet and talk and help themselves.
Another library where there wasn't a decent place for refugee services.
I just talked to a library in Kansas I the librarian said, the local visiting nursing association lost their offices and we had extra offices and that's now the headquarters for visiting nurses and program health.
There's a whole bunch of ways we can do this.
Same thing with programming, as well.
The 20-year staffing plan is basically saying if we're looking at diversity, we start with the kids.
We start with the pages, the kids in high school and college and I always like to mention, down in Farmington, New Mexico, the wonderful folks at the library and Karen McFeeders who started with the kids from the tribal nations and the Hispanic community and built relationships with the boys and girls clubs, the united ways, so over the years, there was a larger, larger population of young people who were coming into the library.
So now when you walk into that library, the people behind the counter look like the community, which was not true 25 years ago.
So, it really is kind of the long game when we're talking about customer service excellence.
The physical environment part --
by the way, I could not resist this photo.
This is in Germany.
I showed this to my husband and he said, whoa!
I'm not suggesting your library looks like this, but I was fascinated by this.
One of the things we want to do is to make sure that people like Pat Wagner, who has hearing problems, eye problems, back surgery, bad knees and is in starting late 60s, has access to walking around your library, the way the healthy 25-year-olds who can easily get on their hands and knees and see what's on the bottom shelf.
This is what we call the warehouse affect.
It is so important for us to have a good collection that we don't realize that more than one person can't get through the shelves or we use library jargon.
One of my favorite phrases was to see this big sign at a public library in Colorado that said, how good are you at fawn  phonological awareness, aimed at the parents who were coming in.
I'm thinking, you know, I'm a college graduate and I'm not stupid.
But it took me a while to figure it out.
Are we using library jargon, rather than words that make sense to people coming in?
Is the staff speaking too softly or too quickly?
That particularly applies to how you answer and talk on the phone.
This is important when you're dealing with people at the front desk, particularly if their behaviorbehavior's off.
We have rearranged and change the front of the library before.
One of my favorite stories about this was one of my clients, it was not a library, it was a veterinary clinic, there were dog fights because it was too cramped and crowded.
Well, we remodeling the front of the clinic to allow for more room for people so there was more spacing and so on.
It cut into some other room that they had, but they made changes and guess what?
The dog fights stopped and I always think of that when I walk into some libraries and say, this is really a great 1950 library or a 1910 Carnegie building, but it's way too crowded at the front the amount of people.
If we changed things, got rid of some of the shelving and move things around, people's behavior would change and that seems to be something that people believe.
We talked about a lot and we're going to keep them busy and there's going to be a test.
No, just kidding.
We've covered a lot of information.
I'm interesting in next steps.
Things that you have done, that you think will work, share I the group.
Here are three things I think are important places to start.
First of all, insure you have the support for the change.
You have the internal leadership, which is that collaborative leadership we talked about before, that you folks mentioned, from the staff to say, we're going to start tweaking what we're doing for more consistency and more outreach and there's going to be changes, sometimes a little bit out of our comfort zone.
How do you feel?
The external leadership, making sure the community's on board.
What are the sacred cows we can't address that might be holding us back?
And remembering you were deemed, the actions you take are going to be much more significant to your community than pronouncements about we are now a welcoming library.
For sure.
So, here's some examples of things to do, to ask for advice and input from people you know.
People connect with the library.
People out there in the community.
Identify community leaders out side the library who are also thinking about these ideas for their institutions.
What is important is you can make little changes, putting up new signs, diversity in the collection.
Outreach to different groups.
Make the changes and let the people know what you're doing and why.
And so that people see that you do take these issues seriously and you want things to be better, as well.
Now, this is the extra credit question.
How do we prepare to make unpopular decisions?
Again, it goes back to communicating well with that leadership outside the library.
So, remember where said that we were going to take a look at this idea of consistency and these five principles?
One of the things you can take back to your library is what's one small thing you can do in each of these categories?
I'm going to flip to the last slide and then come back.
Here's the list of some of the resources from me, where you can find me.
Again, at  -- I'm going to come back here to these questions and then I'm going to turn things back to Jennifer and see if we have any time for questions or wrap-up, at this point.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  
Excellent.
Thank you so much, Pat.
This was so excitcitings and lots to think about.
I am going to encourage people -- there were a few people who privately chatted with me with tough questions that I encourage you to reach out to Pat.
She's an excellent person to bounce those issues off of and can provide you with practical next steps.
I will mention that the learner guide also is an excellent way to work through some of that.
Especially for those of you in environments where maybe you're having trouble getting staff on-board.
Feel free -- download the guide and customize it.
If you have specific scenarios or issues you're trying to tackle, or assigning folks to few this webinar or other webinars on their own and come back and discuss or encourage them to discuss in pairs, leverage this as a tool for you to use locally.
Also, I will be mentioning the other areas on WebJunction that have recourses to explore.
There's an excellent webinar, someone talked about changing models of customer service, in terms of where you're helping customers.
Some of it involves doing customer service outside of the library.
Think outside of the box.
We are at the top of the hour.
I want to thank you, again, pat for your passion and expertise to this topic.
Be sure to reach out to her.
I will send you all an email once everything is uploaded to that event page.
And within a week, I'll send you all a certificate for attending today and I also want to mention that as you leave the environment today, we'll be sending you to a very short survey.
We provide this feedback both to our presenters and we use it as we develop our ongoing programming, so hearing from you is really important to us.
If you don't have time right now, I'll be sure and include a link to the survey in the email I'll send later today.
And, yes, you will all get information on the recording.
Thank you, too, for our tech support and our captioner.
And, Pat, thanks so much.
It's always a pleasure working with you.
>> Pat Wagner:  Thank you.
>> Jennifer Peterson:  All right.
And, everyone, have a fantastic day and we look forward to seeing you at our next webinar, which is in a couple of weeks.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.