Intended for facilitators of workshops on customer care or customer service, this guide offers concrete activities, assessments, and prompts to stimulate discussion. Customer Care: A Training Manual for Library Staff emphasizes the following crucial areas for staff development to provide the best possible service: communication and active listening, handling complaints and challenging situations, assertiveness and confidence in personal interactions, targeted service assessment, and team-building. The book includes case studies that demonstrate diverse libraries’ approaches to assessing customer service and responding to patrons’ requests. One case describes how managers at an academic library succeeded in expanding hours of operation for their café by gathering observational data to use in negotiations with university administrators. In another case, a public library used “secret shoppers” to collect reports on staff members’ behavior and learned that service personnel were quite competent but did not always appear to be openly approachable. A few case studies from industry and commercial settings seem a bit far removed from libraries, but thoughtful readers can draw parallels to library operations.

Every chapter (except the final wrap-up and conclusion) begins with a clear plan for conducting a customer-care training session on the featured topic and preparatory notes for workshop facilitators. The authors provide assessment instruments to use in workshops and suggestions to guide reflection and discussion. Examples are a quiz to assess assertiveness, an activity to interpret body postures for nonverbal communication, and active listening exercises for pairs or small groups. Several tables throughout the text summarize succinctly the focus of various training sessions, such as question styles, signs of stress, sample responses to customer feedback, customer service improvement, and team building. Each chapter ends with a list of recommended sources for further reading.

Customer Care: A Training Manual for Library Staff compares to Julie Todaro’s and Mark L. Smith’s Training Library Staff and Volunteers to Provide Extraordinary Customer Service (Neal-Schuman, 2006), a volume that expresses a more acute focus on libraries overall, explicitly addressing concerns typical of different types and sizes of libraries. One strong point of Gannon-Leary’s and McCarthy’s book is that it provides a structured guide for a series of workshops. This title is recommended for library administrators and courses in library and information science programs on public services management and improvement.