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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
Free Press
April 2009
On Sale: March 24, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 1416546898
EAN: 9781416546894
Hardcover
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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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