Service and business standards

Introduction

Service and Business Standards are our commitment to the staff, students and visitors of the library and the expected level of service that they will receive from the Customer Experience and Insight team. Our standards performance is published here once data has been collected and analysed. The quality of all customer interactions continues to be monitored in order to meet the agreed service level agreement (SLA) objectives. Our performance data is reviewed every six months to inform areas for development and celebrate customer service success.

Our Service Standards (SLAs)

We acknowledge a gap in the collection of data for our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) from Spring 2023 - this was caused by two factors:

  • The University of Hull’s Digital Transformation projects (started in 2022, still ongoing) – the University wanted to address the issues of poor user experience, disjointed data, slow processing, poor workflow and decided to invest in its digital estate to facilitate a better experience for students and staff. For the Library, this meant the implementation of ServiceNow as ITSM (IT service management system) in the spring of 2024. The reason for the Library to share a service management system with IT is because, at the time, the Library’s Customer Experience team provided 1st line support for IT queries (commonly known as Triage.) This, however, created several challenges as this ITSM was not particularly well-equipped for dealing with Library-specific queries, especially from external customers. As well as having to adapt and learn a whole new query management system, our team often had to “make do” with workarounds until these issues could be addressed by the ServiceNow development team. Furthermore, to this day, there is still very little understanding and knowledge as to the reporting capabilities of ServiceNow and our team is working in collaboration with our colleagues in Service Management to be able to extract the data we would need for efficient and useful data monitoring for our SLAs.
  • Staffing changes and subsequent restructure of our leadership team. To address this and prevent any future disruption we are establishing a dedicated working practice group focused on the ongoing monitoring of SLAs and the consistent collection of relevant data. This initiative aims to ensure continuity and accountability, minimising any potential single points of failure. By implementing this approach, we are committed to upholding the high standards outlined in our Service and Business Standards.

Our Business Standards

1.

In 2024 we implemented a new online enquiry system. Due to an administrative error, voicemails were not routed through the system and we had to implement a workaround when we discovered this.

2.

Our library management system was offline for 2.5 days which meant we were unable to see and action the available holds for that period.