Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us
Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Journalist Emily Yellin pens a lively narrative exploring the very human stories behind the often-inhuman face of call-center customer service.
Whether it’s the interminable hold times, the multitude of buttons to press, or the automated voices before reaching someone with a measurable pulse—who hasn’t felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and wasted time 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 highly entertaining and far-reaching exploration of the multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its surprising inner-workings. 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 shows the myriad forces that converge to create these aggravating experiences and the people inside and outside the globalized corporate world crusading to make customer service better for us all.
For the first time, Yellin gets reveals the heart behind the never-seen faces of call-center customer service—and why customer service doesn’t have to be this bad.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If you've ever been mildly frustrated, extremely irritated or driven just plain mad by automated customer service lines, rude telephone service representatives or agents who can't speak intelligible English, this book is for you. Yellin (Our Mother's 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 customer's 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 Yellin's 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.
