Customer Reviews

Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I knew Emily Yellin was a fair writer when Fred Smith, founder of Fedex actually sat and visited with her and shared stories. Mr Smith is long past the point of having time to retell old stories, and seldom makes himself available anymore, but he knew she'd come prepared with days of insight and careful observation. He came to life with her questions because she is not coming for a pick, to get even, or leave with an agenda. She's simply reporting how some company's have worked hard to see all this from the customer perspective, and how other company's paid a price by not realizing customers keep calling if ignored and tell friends and websites if talked down to. Her followup to confirm stories was impressive as she could have relied on emotionally driven blogs to jazz up this book. She seeks to show both sides. She's NO hack. She's written for the NY Times, Washington Post, and Time, and one senses she just had a real curiosity about this topic and WANTED to write the book. A good study at the corporate level for sure. John Young

Being in the IT idustry I really could relate to this book. Who doesn't get annoyed at customer service? However, after reading this I understand why and as a result I feel a lot calmer. It's not just a chronicle of customer complaints, the book also brings us the view of the people inside the call centers and executive offices around the world. It's a smart, fun, entertaining read and even offers hope for the future.

This book is a MUST have and MUST read for all persons dealing in customer service. Whether you are a CSR, Manager, or Professor (as I am) teaching Business courses this book is an invaluable addition to the Customer Service Library.

As a person working in this industry, I thought the book was very entertaining and true to life. I'll fess up: I'm a Voice User Interface designer, one of those people who write "phone trees." So I have spent a lot of time working with people in call centers. The book captures that world well, and is a good, and readable, introduction to people who are new to the call center / customer service industry.

She doesn't offer a lot of new conclusions or anything earth shattering for people like me who have been doing it for awhile (but then, I suspect that the general public is her target audience, not me).

She points out that companies are continually walking a line between saving money and serving their customers. She mentions that the "silos" between organizations in a business sometimes get in the way of good communication and good customer service. And, she says that good customer service has to come from a commitment from management at the highest levels of the company. None of this is a surprise.

However, she does offer some interesting tidbits and useful quotes, some from other sources. It's always nice to have new sources for presentations, especially numbers and quotes.

The chapter I thought most worth a read was her interview with David McQuillen, the first "Director of Customer Experience" at Credit Suisse. (p. 248-259) It was very interesting to read his techniques for how he got other parts of his organization to start paying attention to customer satisfaction. He does a lot of "experience immersion," where he makes executives and members of his organization get direct experience with how it feels to be a customer of their organization. He kicked off a presentation to top managers by making a live call to the call center, as a new customer, asking to open a new account. He took executives into branches and made them be customers instead of managers. When customers were making lots of mistakes on new client contracts, he brought the team who authored the contract together and had them observe clients trying to fill out the form. I thought his approach to overall customer experience was very inspirational and well worth emulating.

Overall: The last chapter in particular is interesting and useful. The rest of the book has its entertaining anecdotes, but doesn't offer much in the way of new insights to the industry insider. It would definitely be good for people who are new in the field and want to get a good overview of "customer service" in a general sense. It was very true to reality and Ms. Yellin has written a very interesting, useful book. I wish more people would read it.

In this breezy and entertaining account of customer service, the reader is treated to an excellent overview of the common issues, underlying and emerging technologies, and the impact of outsourcing/offshoring on customer service. The recounting of Comcast's trouble with customer service provides an excellent backdrop for the discussion in the entire book. Snippets about notable traits on customer service in a good number of well-known companies such as Dell, FedEx, AmTrak, AMEX, Amazon, etc. provide an interesting read. Readers may be surprised that there are no examples from the healthcare industry(insurance companies should be a gold mine of customer-service-gone-bad stories). While the author is very successful in providing a good context for some of the following discussions (on speech technology and impact of outsourcing on the customers and the call center operators, for instance), the subtitle of the book may come across as a mild oversell if the reader interprets it in a "psychological" context. Nevertheless, the discussion on outsourcing and a well-balanced account (rarely mentioned at least in Western media)from operators in India, Latin America and Saudi, touches upon some of our inherent biases and predispositions. The discussions centering on GetHuman in the context of emerging speech technologies and general patience of customers is engaging, though Yellin could have perhaps used that as the central theme to justify her subtitle. The sparse set of notes and citations in the book is surprising for a book that provides an excellent background for the industry and its current/emerging themes. Overall, a good entertaining read.

Americans make more than 43 billion customer service calls each year. Too often they're faced with interminable hold times, outsourced agents with hard-to-understand English, or a multitude of buttons to push and automated voices to listen to before reaching someone who may or may not be able to help.

According to a recent survey, 67% of Americans have to "make a fuss to get a problem resolved," and 94% find it very frustrating to call a company and get a recording instead of a human being.

Economics are at the center of the whole mess. Offering a live, American-based customer service agent averages around $7.50/call. Outsourcing calls to live agents in another country brings the average cost down to about $2.35/call. Having the customers take care of the problem themselves, through an automated response phone system, averages around 32 cents per call.

Yellin covers some of the difficulties programming a voice-response system, and better yet, efforts made to avoid the need for calling. These include Internet postings of FAQ, peer forums - ridiculous, as they simply "outsource" problem-solving, cyber agents - eg. programmed voice responses used by Greyhound and Amtrak, and online package/order tracking. Also covered are the abuses returned to CSAs by frustrated or unbalanced customers, the difficulties sometimes incurred in following-up and being directed to different CSAs.

The good news about phone service is that some companies have done a very good job in this area, though albeit with a few slips en route. FedEx is probably the best example. The "bad news" in phone service is that remote customer service is expanding - the latest includes order-taking at fast-food restaurants.

The bad news about "Your Call is (not that) Important to Us" is that most of the material consists of a seemingly infinite number of anecdotal examples of individuals and their frustration stories - it gets old after awhile.

Maybe it's not what I thought. I figured it would be more of an exposé and more in-depth about call-centers and customer service and what sucks. For example, she talks about IVR systems (the dreaded voice-trees) but not how they actually work, how they lose callers, how calls are routed, etc. The chapters tend to drone and and on repeating points at times.

I bought the book for a look from a consumer's point of view but this is really a textbook for business students or people in management to learn lessons about what some companies did wrong or right. In that aspect it's a fine book--aside from it droning on.

As an interested consumer who was hoping to get a behind-the-scenes look at how these infuriating systems work, I was disappointed. I got 82% through it per my Kindle--I just couln't bring myself to finish it.

Thought to skim the book, but could not put it down. Its that good! Not just for customer service but business as a whole, loved the Gladwell quotes and the take on Sprint. WELL DONE!

Book is well written, addresses issues we have all had with rude customer service(or lack of) sometime humorus sometimes disgusting, we all seem to have our own horror stories relating to this issue.

Well written and interesting. This book gives you the perspective of all the parties involved in customer service - the customer, the customer service rep, and the company with the product/service to support.