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

Emily Yellin is the author of Our Mothers’ War, and was a longtime contributor to the New York Times. She has also written for Time, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin—Madison with a degree in English literature and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She currently lives in Memphis, Tennessee.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In 1910, when the need for an operator meant that every phone call involved an encounter with customer service, Herbert Casson wrote, "No matter how many millions of dollars are spent on cables and switchboards, the quality of telephone service depends upon the girl at the exchange end of the wire." If corporations had only listened to Casson for the last hundred years, there wouldn't be so many problems for Emily Yellin to take on in this book, in which she valiantly sets out to make some sense of the world we consumers helplessly navigate. She ends up indicting the corporate strategy of skimping on consumer relations in the quest for profit. And she will convince you, in the unlikely event that you haven't already been convinced by a toll-free call that left you mentally wringing someone's neck. (Hey Verizon, can you hear me now?) The principal problem is that customer service reps generally don't know what the hell they're talking about, but Yellin patiently investigates where the blame actually lies and shows how thinly and widely it is spread. You might find your sympathies coming to rest on unexpected people, like the one on the other end of your next call. Unfortunately, Yellin's analysis rarely goes deeper than repeating that companies ought to view customer service more as a chance to score points than as a sinkhole for cash. But she unearths some nice factual nuggets and gathers insight from sources far and wide, like the actress behind the voice of "Amtrak Julie" and the young guy in Buenos Aires who gave her a refund when Office Depot bungled her order. --Evan Hughes

Introduction to the Paperback Edition ix

Author's Note to the Hardcover Edition xv

1 Random Acts of Rudeness 1

Customers encounters, Comcast, and Customer rage

2 What Would Alexander Graham Bell Say Now? 20

The telephone and the birth of today's customer service industry

3 "You're Going to Listen to Me" 41

Internet advocacy, Consumerist.com, AOL, GetHuman.com, and Sweden 41

4 To Send Us Your Firstborn, Please Press or Say "One" 72

Automation, Amtrak Julie, artificial intelligence, and eavesdropping 72

5 The Other End of the Line 102

Call centers, JetBlue, reps, supervisors, prisons, and CustomersSuck.com

6 The Next Available Agent: John, Juan, Sean, or Sanjay 135

International outsourcing, Argentina, TeleTech, Egypt, and the United Kingdom

7 The Solution Is the Problem 179

The old AT&T Wireless, Sprint, consultants, cottage industries, and CRM

8 Absolutely, Positively 214

FedEx, Zappos.com, Credit Suisse, and CEOs

9 Your Tweet Is Important to Us 257

New Chapter for the Paperback Edition

Appendix: Updates Since the Hardcover 265

Acknowledgments 270

Notes 279

Index 291