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Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us
Emily Yellin
Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives
Simon and Schuster
August 2010
On Sale: August 17, 2010
292 pages ISBN: 1416546901 EAN: 9781416546900 Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
Bring up the subject of customer service phone calls and the
blood pressure of everyone within earshot rises
exponentially. Otherwise calm, rational, and intelligent
people go into extended rants about an industry that seems
to grow more inhuman and unhelpful with every phone call we
make. And Americans make more than 43 billion customer
service calls each year. Whether it's the interminable
hold times, the outsourced agents who can't speak English,
or the multitude of buttons to press and automated voices to
listen to before reaching someone with a measurable pulse --
who hasn't felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and
wasted time we experience when all we want is help, and
maybe a little human kindness? Your Call Is (Not
That) Important to Us is journalist Emily Yellin's
engaging, funny, and far-reaching exploration of the
multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its
surprising inner-workings. Yellin reveals the real human
beings and often surreal corporate policies lurking behind
its aggravating façade. After reading this first-ever
investigation of the customer service world, you'll never
view your call-center encounters in quite the same way.
Since customer service has a role in just about
every industry on earth, Yellin travels the country and the
world, meeting a wide range of customer service reps,
corporate decision makers, industry watchers, and
Internet-based consumer activists. She spends time at
outsourced call centers for Office Depot in Argentina and
Microsoft in Egypt. She gets to know the Mormon wives who
answer JetBlue's customer service calls from their homes in
Salt Lake City, and listens in on calls from around the
globe at a FedEx customer service center in Memphis. She
meets with the creators of the yearly Customer Rage Study,
customer experience specialists at Credit Suisse in Zurich,
the founder and CEO of FedEx, and the CEO of the rising
Internet retailer Zappos.com. Yellin finds out which country
complains about service the most (Sweden), interviews an
actress who provides the voice for automated answering
systems at many big corporations, and talks to the people
who run a website (GetHuman.com that posts codes for
bypassing automated voices and getting to an actual human
being at more than five hundred major companies.
Yellin weaves her vast reporting into an entertaining
narrative that sheds light on the complex forces that create
our infuriating experiences. She chronicles how the Internet
and global competition are forcing businesses to take their
customers' needs more seriously and offers hope from people
inside and outside the globalized corporate world fighting
to make customer service better for us all. Your
Call Is (Not That) Important to Us cuts through
corporate jargon and consumer distress to provide an
eye-opening and animated account of the way companies treat
their customers, how customers treat the people who serve
them, and how technology, globalization, class, race,
gender, and culture influence these interactions. Frustrated
customers, smart executives, and dedicated customer service
reps alike will find this lively examination of the
crossroads of world commerce -- the point where businesses
and their customers meet -- illuminating and essential.
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