CUSTOMER SERVICE AND EXCELLENCE

Customer Service and Excellence

Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Academic Libraries

Introduction

A university library may be drawn as the heart of the learning community, furnishing a place for lecturers, students, and researchers to do their research and advance their knowledge. With emphasis being placed on electronic resources and the learning community is interested in practical information services through Internet, academic libraries desperately require to evaluate the quality of its services and how user satisfaction can be improved. Assessment of library service quality has been a questionable agenda as traditional measures of collection size, counts of use, number of staff and size of the budget are no longer applicable and societal concern for quality and accountability in information services of higher education has increased (Danuta, 1996,, 181).

Related to service quality is the concept of customer satisfaction. Writers and practitioners in the popular urge incline to apply the term quality interchangeably and satisfaction, but scholars have endeavored to be accurate about the measurements and meanings of the 2-concepts, leading in significant argument. Though, the two concepts have some common things, satisfaction is generally deemed as a wider phenomenon. However, service quality emphasizes on service's dimensions. On the basis of this view, service quality is an element of customer satisfaction.

Researchers have proposed that service quality offers a superior indicator of clients' satisfaction and indicates that service quality can be influenced clients' satisfaction. All over, frequent satisfaction with service meets effects in a service quality's perception.

Source: (Zeithaml et al. 2006, p.107)

The global society has given priority to the quality of goods and is responsive to better services today. Low quality products together with lower than expected services reduce the customers' trust in producers of goods and providers of services. Evaluating the quality of services is an essential prerequisite for a better planning for the organizations' services. Today, quality is defined by what the customers want, and their perceptions and expectations are the most important factors in determining the quality. Customers and service receivers compare the quality of goods and services with their own perceptions and expectations and thus evaluate them. "Parasuraman et al" believe that perceptions indicate the customers' evaluation of the quality of services provided, and expectations are the same as the customers' wants and reflect their feelings about what services should be like in reality. Quality is a term meaning different things to different people. We have to have a clear understanding of the concept of quality to improve services. Defining quality is not just important from a conceptual point of view; it is also an incentive to direct the service provider to attain greater quality (James, 1992,, 356).

Overall, according to ISO 11620, the quality of a library is defined as such; all properties and characteristics of a source of services affecting the potential of a library to fulfill the visible and hidden needs. Libraries are service establishments with a basic and vital role in achieving sustainable development to such an extent that one can claim to attain ...