​Part Time Library Advisor – Customer Experience

£13.50 per hour

22.5 hours per week

Milton Keynes – on site

6 month contract

8th January 2024 start

Sue Hill Recruitment Ltd are pleased to be working with this Higher Education client who are looking to recruit a Library Advisor in their Customer Experience team for Library Services. You will be part of a rota of Library staff providing high quality customer support at the library’s welcome desks and online service points. You will be responsible for tracking and managing overdue loans, missing items, and unfulfilled reservations to help ensure the effective circulation of print library stock.

Library Services has four libraries across the sites. All the libraries provide a rich collection of specialist library resources and services to support the students learning and research needs.

Key Tasks & Responsibilities:

•       Responding to enquiries, answering where appropriate and referring in-depth queries on to specialist colleagues. This includes handling face to face, phone, email, and online chat enquiries from both on-site and remote customers.

•       Carry out shared duties including opening and closing procedures, stock shelving, reservation processing, occupancy monitoring, and similar.

•       Track, contact and negotiate with defaulters who have overdue and recalled library resources, or who have left, responding supportively and sensitively to those in difficult circumstances.

•       Liaise with colleagues to facilitate the recovery of non-returned items and arrange invoicing for non-returned items.

•       Track and process reserved, missing, and in-transit library items in collaboration with colleagues at other libraries.

•       Track and process Lab Notebook requests in line with data retention policies.

•       Process postal loan requests and monitor refunds on unused postage.

•       Research prices and liaise with Librarians regarding replacement of missing or non-returned items.

•       Track and manage unfulfilled reservations, liaising with librarians to provide alternate options where a particular item is not available within a reasonable timeframe.

•       Manage library account status in response to registry updates (e.g., student withdrawals, suspensions, etc). Includes handling entitlement updates for customers using the Sconul Access scheme.

Person Specification:

•       Good general level of education to at least ‘A’ level (plus GCSE English and Maths).

•       A strong understanding of the principles of good library customer service and experience supporting users in a customer facing role – handling and proactively dealing with routine and non-routine problems.

•       Accurate, methodical approach to work, good attention to detail.

•       Excellent oral and written communication skills, excellent numeracy and analytical skills.

•       Strong organisational and time management skills.

•       Ability to prioritise and schedule workloads in the face of conflicting demands.

•       Able to work on own initiative with minimal supervision.

•       Able to work with a variety of customers and colleagues in a professional, friendly, and effective manner.

•       Good team player, flexible and co-operative, coupled with high level of personal responsibility and initiative.

•       Working knowledge of Microsoft software packages especially Outlook (email), Word, and Excel and the ability to learn new systems.