Newcastle City Library & Community Hub

Overview

Newcastle City Library expanded their services to become a community hub. With a long list of new activities and services to plan and deliver, including exhibitions, classes and events, the management team wanted to ensure this huge transition was as successful as possible.

After researching some of the available solutions, they discovered Ombea had a solution that covered everything they needed. They placed an ExpressPod at the building’s exit to collect feedback from the users of the community hub. This involved the visitors providing a simple satisfaction rating of their experience and was quick and easy for library staff to set up, as well as quick and easy for visitors to do – just a simple press of a button.

This gives them the information needed to help with important decision making such as where funding and resources should be used, by revealing how relevant and worthwhile an exhibition or class is.

Industry

  • Government

Application

  • Customer Experience

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Problem

When Newcastle City Library expanded their services to become a community hub, it presented a number of challenges from training employees to be able to support the new services, to ensuring the services added real value to the local community. With a long list of new activities and services to plan and deliver, including exhibitions, classes and events, the management team wanted to ensure this huge transition was as successful as possible.

They identified that in order to measure how well the transition from library to community hub progressed, they required a way to monitor important performance indicators. This would enable them to see what was working well and flag if they needed to change their approach to any of the new services they were providing.

What they required was a method of collating vital feedback from the local community members who were using the new services. The key priorities were to implement an easy to use feedback method that could also provide valuable data to management. They also wanted to be able to have some hard evidence that funding was being well spent and was benefiting the local community in line with the council’s targets.

Newcastle city library

Solution

After researching some of the available solutions, they discovered Ombea had a solution that covered everything they needed, plus some powerful features that they didn’t yet know they needed.

They installed the Ombea ExpressPod in the library, initially testing it with an employee wellbeing survey that provided them with some important insights. As the employees had gone through a period of significant changes, including their responsibilities, this was the perfect time to take a look at how this had affected their engagement.

Further to this, it gave them the opportunity to get more familiar with the capabilities of the ExpressPod and learn more about the different ways it could help them. They were able to work out how to use the system and give it a test run before rolling it out to the public.

Confident in their ability to use it and the reliability of the results, the next step was to place the ExpressPod at the building’s exit to collect feedback from the users of the community hub. This involved the visitors providing a simple satisfaction rating of their experience and was quick and easy for library staff to set up, as well as quick and easy for visitors to do – just a simple press of a button.

The data was then readily available with reports driven by Ombea Insights that managers could analyse, share with important stakeholders and discuss with the team.

Expresspod

Results

Library managers were quickly able to review the satisfaction levels of visitors and it also provided the information required to check where issues had impacted the levels of satisfaction. The trends in the survey answers allowed managers to assess where they needed to improve parts of the services. Any issues such as staff unavailability/waiting for assistance could be identified and quickly rectified.

Andrew Scrogham, Service Delivery Specialist reflected upon the success of the ExpressPod so far, saying that the responses had mostly been positive, indicating that the challenging expansion to provide a wider range of services had gone well.

Whilst it is still early days, he can’t wait to get even more value from the ExpressPod in the future:

“We are really excited about the ExpressPods. I am looking forward to seeing the kinds of changes we will make as a result of the data.”

He also underlined how important is was to gain input from the community about the services that are provided to them and ensuring that they are getting the most out of the hub:

“The ExpressPods are a way of showing our visitors that we care about their experience.”

They are now planning to ask follow up questions that will collate more specific feedback in relation to particular services and events, to get greater insight into what aspects are thriving and where any improvements are required.

This will give them the information needed to help with important decision making such as where funding and resources should be used, by revealing how relevant and worthwhile an exhibition or class is. It could also be used to find out what additional services visitors would like to see and to identify whether there are any problems such as limited parking that are preventing people from visiting the community hub.

Newcastle City Library and Community Hub have already seen the powerful insights possible with the Ombea ExpressPod and they are now ready to unleash even more of the features to ensure they continue to deliver service improvements.

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