It is one of the most maddening ordeals of modern life. You are having a problem with a product or service, and so (fool that you are) you call a customer-help number, only to be greeted by a cheerfully inept or robotically indifferent voice at the end of the line — sometimes human, other times a simulacrum, and nearly always emanating from a source far from home. In “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us,” Emily Yellin strives to “seek out the humanity and reason behind the customer service experiences that many people find to be inhuman and nonsensical.”
Ms. Yellin, a Memphis-based journalist, mixes polls and studies with excerpts from published reports and her own insightful reporting from call centers and related businesses in the U.S. and overseas. Among the waking nightmares she comes across: that of New Yorker Junius Harris, who spends weeks trying to get his Verizon landline number switched to his new apartment. The previous tenants have not canceled their account with AT&T, and so Mr. Harris finds himself trapped in the limbo between two unhelpful phone companies as his moving date draws ever closer. His Kafkaesque struggle ends only when, in desperation, he takes a Verizon agent’s hint and impersonates his vacationing landlord during a call to AT&T — Greek accent, broken English and all.
Such frustrations are not new. According to Ms. Yellin, in 1882 the New York Times noted: “There is nothing that will so excite the irritability of a person, apparently, as the telephone.” By 1902, she tells us, “swearing at operators had become illegal in many places.”
Today rudeness is not an indictable offense — a good thing, too, given the negativity on both sides of the customer-provider equation. Companies naturally try to keep costs down, sometimes rating the performance of their harried call-center workers by the number of calls they log, not by how well they resolve callers’ complaints. Is it any wonder that few such employees stick around long enough to attain true competence? Or companies move their help desks to countries where costs are low but accents are impenetrable. Or they switch to computer systems that leave already unhappy customers shouting their responses at an unresponsive machine.
“The approximate cost of offering a live, American-based, customer service agent averages somewhere around $7.50 per phone call,” Ms. Yellin says. “Outsourcing calls to live agents in another country brings the average cost down to about $2.35 per call. Having customers take care of the problems themselves, through an automated response phone system, averages around 32 cents per call, or contact.”
Too often, Ms. Yellin notes, there is a disconnect between the customer-service line and a company’s product- development and marketing departments. Who better to flag problems, or to pass on suggestions for improvement, than the people who listen to complaints? But in too many places, these agents are not treated as a vital resource. Angry customers have found a work-around, taking their grievances to the blogosphere and often creating a public-relations disaster for companies that might have resolved a problem quickly at the front lines of customer service.
Ms. Yellin is at her best when she offers portraits of the normally invisible folks who toil at successful help desks. We meet Tom and Marlene Goudie, for example, a Mormon couple in Salt Lake City who work side by side in their spare bedroom resolving customer problems for JetBlue. Mrs. Goudie “says she knew she was in the right place when she answered her very first call.” It took 90 minutes, “but her supervisors didn’t complain. Instead, they understood they had hired the right person.”
We visit Buenos Aires, where Ms. Yellin comes face-to-face with Pablo, the supervisor at a TeleTech call center who, six months earlier, had given her a full order of toner and paper free after she called to complain that her purchase from Office Depot still hadn’t arrived a day after it was due. Pablo, who had majored in psychology in college, tries to put himself in the shoes of both the customers he serves and the agents he supervises. American complaints about deliveries that are, say, a half-hour late or about tiny price differences can be baffling to Argentineans. “We are very used to not having our deliveries on time,” Pablo says. “We’re very used to being overcharged.” He has come to admire Americans, though, for demanding “what they think is right.”
Back on U.S. turf, we land in Ms. Yellin’s home town, where FedEx, that paragon of customer service, is the largest private employer. Remember those “recordings for quality assurance” you are always warned about? FedEx uses them to spot rude and unhelpful employees. Ms. Yellin is there as a customer-advocacy team listens to the tapes of one such bad apple, a sour New Englander who presents “what everyone in the call center euphemistically refers to as ‘a coaching opportunity.’ ”
There are people devoted to making computers more humane, too. Robbie Kilgore, a former keyboard player who recorded with the Rolling Stones, now tries to make the interactions between customers and computers closer to a real conversation. It is reassuring, he tells Ms. Yellin, when a computer, instead of just repeating “I didn’t understand that” over and over again, acknowledges that it is responding a second time by saying “I’m sorry. I still didn’t understand that.”
Does “Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us” keep its consumer perfectly satisfied? Well, it seems more like a series of free-standing magazine features than an unbroken narrative arc, and it sometimes bogs down in the detail. (We probably don’t need to know that most of Microsoft’s Portuguese-speaking customers are routed to a call center in Cairo but that calls from Brazil go to a center inside Brazil.) But Ms. Yellin is an illuminating guide whose conclusions are sound: “The intangibles at the heart of each positive encounter remain constant on all sides: trust, respect, empathy, caring, and even some fun.” Who would complain about that?
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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785194159219179.html
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