I was challenged recently to defend my assertion that we delivered the best service we could. "How can you say that you are delivering a good service," asked my challenger, "If you don't ask your customers what they want and then give it to them?" There was something about this that felt viscerally wrong to me, but I'm not a quick thinker - I'll never manage an elevator pitch unless the elevator breaks down - so it took until today for me to wake up with the answer.
Why should we think that what our customers want is necessarily the best thing for the service? Henry Ford famously said that he would never have developed the motor car if he had asked what his customers wanted, as what they would have asked for would have been a faster horse.
I find that all the time I am being asked for what in effect are faster horses, and I suspect that this is the position that most of us find ourselves in. Is it lack of assertiveness on our part, or lack of imagination on the part of our customers, that leaves libraries clip-clopping along on Dobbin?
Maybe it's a question of finding out what our customers 'need to do', rather than 'what they want'. I agree that sometimes people don't know or can't envisage what the options are for improving the services they receive, but by looking at what it is they need to do, we can begin to develop ways to help them achieve those goals more effectively.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny (well, okay, it's not funny): We call ourselves information professionals, and we call what we do information science, but where is the science? We rely on user surveys to guide what we do, but what do user surveys measure but user impressions and user emotions? Where is the research into what users need?
ReplyDeleteThanks to both for your comments.
ReplyDeleteI half take the point about "want" and "need", but very often find that folk (and not just my children) say that they "need" something, only for me patiently and pedantically to tell them that what they mean is that they "want" it. (As in, "I need FIFA 12"). Library colleagues will say that they need certain functionality in the catalogue, for example, when what they mean is that they want what they are familiar with.
I also half agree with the need for research, although research often ends up proving what the researcher wants or expects it to prove.
What I find a bit sad is that we tend to recognise what we want when we see it in another context - just as we all wanted to Amazon-ify our catalogues - but we don't find these models within the library world.