Historically, academic libraries have struggled with providing consistent customer service. How might understanding the underlying motivations of staff – including student workers – impact the quality of customer service an academic library is able to provide? This poster presents a theoretical model that explores whether alternative customer service models -- where more time, energy, and passion is invested in the staff who interact with the public on a daily basis -- would result in academic libraries seeing a larger return on investment in terms of student success, faculty support, brand loyalty and advocacy, and overall user satisfaction. We will review the current research on consistent customer service in academic libraries and describe alternative methods of customer service training used by businesses and other non-library organizations to explore the principles behind employee motivation techniques. We also plan to show how this kind of training could be implemented in libraries to improve employee support and patron satisfaction. We plan to additionally present a model for research that would identify gaps (if any) between what employees identify as motivators and what their supervisors perceive as motivators, to be able to offer recommendations to better train both employees and supervisors to provide higher quality customer service.
