Standardizing how BAnQ measures the customer experience

Summary

BAnQ (Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec) wanted to develop a customer experience indicator that could be used in its strategic planning to see how the institution improved the patron experience over time through various projects and investments.

Being a public institution with free, widely-used and widely-appreciated services meant BAnQ was always highly rated using tools like the NPS. Prior year NPS exercises also remained quite hard to take action on, due to its vagueness, while an accompanying CSAT had been implemented online but not for in person services, leaving only a partial picture which services were most appreciated or needed improvement.

Process

Scores

Together with the experience committee, we determined that we wanted to calculate the experience for both in person and online services and for different service types so we could compare them to each other. Here we refer to activities as scheduled, temporary events hosted by staff, while services are ongoing processes performed by staff during opening hours.

We chose to develop a global indicator based on 5 experience scores for the following :

In person activities
Online activities
In person services
Online services (ex. remote support from staff)
Digital platforms

Dimensions

There were 3 possible dimensions for patrons to score activities and services on :

Overall satisfaction
Satisfaction with space, materials and environment
Interaction with staff

Digital platform experience was measured slightly differently, on 2 dimensions :

Ability for patron to achieve their objective
Overall satisfaction with the digital experience

For each dimension, we created a Likert scale out of 5 that went from "frustrating and irritating" to "amazing". We deliberately chose to include negatively charged words to make sure patrons could express their frustration when things went poorly, instead of using sanitizing language that felt too distant from reality.

I worked with BAnQ data analysts to ensure the score calculations were reliable and could be combined to make our overall indicator. We also worked with the in-person staff to collect, transcribe and document all of the in-person experience scores throughout BAnQ's 14 establishments.

Likert scale to evaluate an in-person service

Outcome

Our first institution-wide annual experience survey left us with a starting score of 3.70 out 5. This was a significant departure from prior NPS exercises and led to a positive development. When we analyzed all 5 experience scores, we came to the realization that our digital platforms greatly affected in the patron experience and pulled the score down significantly. This led BAnQ to prioritize digital improvement projects in its experience roadmap.