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

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Key Phrases: please press, foreign call centers, speech analytics, United States, The Next Available Agent, You're Going (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If youve ever been mildly frustrated, extremely irritated or driven just plain mad by automated customer service lines, rude telephone service representatives or agents who cant speak intelligible English, this book is for you. Yellin (Our Mothers War) dives into the often dysfunctional world of customer service, exploring the multimillion-dollar industry from various points of view, interviewing exasperated consumers, displeased CEOs and infuriated customer service reps themselves. She includes transcripts of agonizing telephone exchanges, such as one where an AOL rep tries to thwart a customers cancellation of his account, blog excerpts from reps who feel abused and as if they are being treated as machines and countless stories from irritated and confused managers. While Yellins study offers more industry anecdotes than concrete solutions, readers will likely look at the industry differently and with more empathy for those who participate in it. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Neither the title nor the subtitle of this book should be taken seriously. Though "Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us" does begin with a chapter describing the frustrations Americans too frequently encounter when they call customer service, basically the book is a rather upbeat account of how businesses are trying to improve service -- whether by telephone, Internet or in person -- and to respond more positively to consumer needs. As to what all this "Reveals About Our World and Our Lives," well, on the evidence of this book, the short answer is: not much. Still, Emily Yellin's second book -- her first was "Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II" (2004) -- has the virtue of taking us into a part of our world that is large and important yet about which most of us know next to nothing. At her very best she writes marginally competent journalese, and most of the time she is content to quote extensively from interviews and other published sources rather than attempting her own analysis. But she has assembled a lot of information, and a lot of it is interesting. If there lives today a single adult American who has not yet had an unpleasant experience while trying to obtain service or information by telephone -- from a utility, a bank, a credit-card issuer, an airline, a retailer, you name it -- then that person either has been kissed by the gods or lives in Never Never Land. It has become the essential American experience, as ubiquitous and inescapable as death, taxes and driver's-license renewal. Punching one's way through the tree of numbers on a company's automated voice system, finally to reach someone who (a) speaks what amounts to a foreign language, (b) hasn't a clue about how to help you or (c) simply disconnects you, has become as much a part of daily routine as coffee and toast. Picking up the phone to call -- oh, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Bank of America or Dell -- induces dread, raises the blood pressure, brings on palpitations. What we have to thank for this state of affairs is what we have to thank for so much else in this blessed age: technology. "Customer service" feeds on technology: "Rotary dials gave way to touch-tone phones starting in the 1960s," Yellin writes, "paving the way for early automatic response systems requiring a caller to press a number to reach a department. Automated recordings began to replace long-distance operators on collect calls. Answering machines arose, the precursors to voice mail. Then personal computers became standard at home and work, replacing typewriters. With them, telephone help lines sprang up to assist customers in dealing with their computers. The lines were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. That started to cement the idea that customer service could be available around the clock." Or, all too often, unavailable. With the rarest of exceptions, businesses went into customer service reluctantly, if not grudgingly. Unlike the sales of consumer goods or the monthly use of utilities, customer service is difficult to quantify in terms of profit or loss. Rather than see it as a way to increase customer loyalty and learn more about what customers need and want, businesses shrugged off customer-service departments as what Yellin calls "a necessary expense of doing business rather than as potential profit centers" and tried to do them on the cheap. Since "the most tangible measure is the cost per call, or contact," they moved away from "offering a live, American-based, customer service agent [at] around $7.50 per phone call" and focused on overseas agents ($2.35 per call) or automated response systems (32 cents per call). The result was, and generally remains to this day, a system more notable for rudeness, inefficiency and indifference than for service. As Yellin suggests, many people have no problem dealing with an automated system if it actually does what they need to have done and indeed are just as happy to avoid the potential complications of direct human contact. But there are times when only a real person can solve your problem, and companies make it as difficult as they possibly can for you to get through to that person. Precisely how much time Americans (and beleaguered millions in other countries) waste on hold or pursuing chimeras of "service" is just about impossible to determine, but it must be measured in the megabillions of hours per year, when you consider that as of 2007 "American call centers received 43 billion calls." Yellin is at pains to emphasize that with the predictable exception of a few rotten apples, those who answer the phone mostly are decent people who try to do their jobs effectively and courteously. She goes into considerable detail about FedEx reps in Memphis (where Yellin lives) and makes a persuasive case that, in the words of the company's founder, Fred Smith, "the focus on customer service has been one of the critical success factors of FedEx"; indeed, "it was baked in from the earliest days." In this, FedEx is unlike most corporations, which regard call centers and other forms of customer service as peripheral to the central task of increasing profits. They don't understand that, thanks largely to the Internet and the possibilities it offers for rapid dissemination of negative information about businesses' performance, "the power has shifted to the consumer," in the words of one consumer-affairs manager. With choice proliferating in many parts of the American economy -- phone companies, cable and broadband providers, even basic utilities in some locations -- people no longer have to settle for lousy service. When Comcast stopped enjoying monopoly privileges and started facing competition, guess what happened: Comcast started paying attention to customer service. As more companies learn the same lesson, we can only pray that others will follow suit. [e-mail]
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (March 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416546898
• ISBN-13: 978-1416546894
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #192,405 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very entertaining read, April 2, 2009

By	Barrie Pike "Quick Snapper" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Should Have Been Condensed to an Article!, March 26, 2009

By	Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist" (Phoenix, AZ.) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dont hang up on this book..., August 24, 2009

By	Sreeram Ramakrishnan (Yorktown Heights, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.