Customer service excellence
Customer Service Excellence is a mark of quality for our services which is focused towards the individual needs and preferences of our customers.
Contact the library
Customer Service Excellence is a mark of quality for our services which is focused towards the individual needs and preferences of our customers.
Contact the library
The University of Hull Library (the Brynmor Jones Library) was first awarded Customer Service Excellence in 2019, successfully achieving the University’s first Customer Service Excellence award. Customer Service Excellence is a mark of quality for our services which is focused towards the individual needs and preferences of our customers. It creates opportunities to provide innovative and improved services, striving to go above and beyond expectation.
We are now in a rolling programme of annual assessments to maintain the Standard. In July 2025 we successfully completed the second year of a new cycle of rolling assessment, having gathered a portfolio of evidence which was supported by an in-person visit from an independent assessor who spent a day in the library observing our operations and talking to our staff, customers and partners. Our services are fully compliant in all elements of the Standard, which is an outstanding achievement. There continues to be an impressive total of seventeen Compliance Plus* elements.
Our assessor highlighted that the Library staff provide an excellent level of service, working very well as a team, and demonstrating empowerment to contribute to service development across a range of areas. Many of the ideas for service improvement have come from staff, including the introduction of job shadowing with internal partners, and the sharing of good practice.
The Team has an outstanding in-depth understanding of its customers, that has enabled it to design and provide services that meet the needs of the full range of customer groups
In order to be recognised as achieving Customer Service Excellence, the Library created an extensive portfolio of evidence which was presented and assessed by an external licensed body. The detailed criteria found in the Customer Service Excellence standard is split into five sections:
The University Library serves many customers both within and beyond the University of Hull. To meet this criterion we had to demonstrate how we consulted our customers and provided them opportunities to feedback on our services. We have an ethos of putting customers at the heart of everything we do, focusing on how we can use data and feedback to improve our services.
This customer focused culture within the University Library continues as evidence for this criterion. We had to show our commitment to fostering this culture across all levels of our employees. We competitively want to be the best and challenge others to think differently.
We provide accurate and comprehensive information to our customers in order to demonstrate that we meet this criterion. Whether that’s our library social media feeds (on Instagram and YouTube), digital signage, library webpages, or partnering with the university to send updates via email, we measure how much communication has been understood to ensure these methods are effective.
Delivery focuses on how the University library utilises comments, complaints and feedback in order to make adjustments to our operations. We have a responsibility to adhere to national and statutory targets such as our equality, diversity and inclusion provisions and this forms part of our evidence for this criterion.
The University Library publishes expected response times to customer contact, whilst monitoring data to maintain high levels of communication quality. Our business and service standards help us to maintain standards and consistency of our service. We review these monthly, putting in place any action necessary alongside benchmarking our approach with other institutions.