Infoblog

Posts Tagged ‘cheryl gould’

The challenge, when you love everything you promote, is to draw attention to something which stands out above all the other great offerings. One of those “special children” for those of us working with Infopeople is Cheryl Gould’s latest offering, “Fully Engaged Customer Service,” so Infopeople is offering it at a 50 percent discount to any library willing to book a contract offering at $1,000 per day.
Here’s how Infopeople Project Director Holly Hinman has described it to library directors throughout the state:
“At first glance, you may think that this is ‘just another’ customer service workshop, but it’s not. This workshop comes out of an LSTA grant project in which the Silicon Valley Library System/San Jose Public Library hired Infopeople to develop a new, highly experiential and interactive customer service training program based on recommendations from the Envirosell study of customer service in San Jose and Hayward branches. ‘Fully Engaged Customer Service’ employs an almost continuous series of short, intense exercises that give participants the experience of real-life customer interactions and practice in good customer service behaviors. In other words, this workshop doesn’t just ‘talk the talk,’ it ‘walks the walk.’
“This workshop has proven results, as documented by a series of studies by Godbe Research. Amelia Davidson of Godbe Research says that ‘Godbe Research found the training to be highly effective in teaching library staff to be more proactive in approaching customers, to be more inquisitive with customers about their needs in order to ensure that barriers are overcome, and to use interactions to teach customers about the full range of services offered by the library. Based on the results of our studies, we give the training our strongest recommendation.
“’The customer service training program developed by Infopeople has had a significant and sustained effect on the quality of library staff’s interactions with patrons. Following the training, library staff were found to initiate four times as many interactions with customers. The training also was found to have a significant effect on performance ratings collected in the study. Specifically, the training significantly improved the performance of library staff in the following areas: eye-contact, facial expression, availability to patrons, assessment of patron needs, quality of information provided to patrons, and the outcome of the interaction. Moreover, these improvements were sustained from the immediate, post-training assessment to the follow-up assessment that occurred one month after training. In addition to these objective performance measures, the training was also found to have a significant effect on the attitudes of library staff toward customer service and patron interactions.’”
Those interested in scheduling this as a contract workshop for their library or system can contact Gini Ambrosino (gini@infopeople.org). Those interested in attending currently scheduled sessions (Alameda County Library – Fremont, 2/9/2009; San Francisco Public Library, 2/19/2009; Buena Park Library District, 3/17/2009; and San Diego County Library Headquarters, 3/18/2009) will find registration continuing on the Infopeople website at a cost of $75 per participant.

Staff and administrators in many libraries are starting to think about training which reaches all employees—not just librarians—and includes pre- and post-workshop activities with peer trainers. While others continue to think, Infopeople Training Consultant Cheryl Gould and key players at Contra Costa County Library here in the San Francisco Bay Area have been shaping this growing trend.
When County Librarian Anne Cain supported Library Human Resources Manager Janet Hildebrand and Cheryl’s proposal to have every one of the nearly 300 staff members working in the system’s 25 facilities register for standard one-day computer competencies workshops last year, she relied on a successful Library tradition: using peer trainers as an integral component of training sessions, Janet said recently in a conversation we had. Janet and Cheryl worked with Library staff. They combined Infopeople’s Increase Your Computer Competency: Practical Tips and Tricks workshop with the Helping the Public with Public Access Computers workshop. The result was a new session which would help the library director achieve the vision she, Janet, and Cheryl had for the Library’s staff.
The results went far beyond the initial goal of helping staff learn more about the technology they were using, according to Janet. By pulling in representatives of each unit within the Library system as the workshops were being developed, peer trainers were prepared; the course content was designed in a way which would meet needs of staff at every level of experience; and the peer trainers coalesced as a group through post-workshop follow-up sessions led by Cheryl.
“It was wonderful to see how much everyone got out of the class,” Janet said. “They were able to turn to their neighbors and give help. We were building, right there in those workshops, the basis for learning together and helping each other learn. We were developing a common language and an openness about discussing what we didn’t know. No one could miss that this was a wonderful thing that was happening.”
In summarizing the successes provided through this process, Janet noted that the “computer competency learning environment has become established and staff is talking to each other, reminding each other, suggesting to each other, looking over each other’s shoulders, asking for help.” Staff has also established and is using a computer-competency wiki. And, best of all, many of the same people who made the computer competency workshop project a success are working together again as a new training initiative is about to be rolled out to staff throughout the Library system.
“It was a fantastic project,” Cheryl agreed. “That was a wonderful, win-win project for the Library.”