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Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us: Customer Service And What It Reveals About Our World And Our Lives;
By Emily Yellin; Free Press;
Pages: 290; Price: $26
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The book is a graphic account of the evolution of customer service — from the birth of the telephone in the US to today’s world connected through 4 billion phones and the World Wide Web. Emily Yellin, a contributor to The New York Times, has penned practical lessons for CEOs, marketing heads and public relations executives on areas such as service delivery, customer care and nurturing customer relationship. In fact, the book is useful to all employees of small to mid-size to large corporations.
Your Call... opens with pithy accounts of encounters of many American customers with rude customer service executives. A quick flip through the first few pages will make an average Indian reader, long used to waiting in queue for virtually everything, empathise with the situations. The book holds special relevance for Indian businesses in the wake of growing consumerism, consumer awareness and consumer advocacy, think ‘Grahak Jago’ campaigns and Mouthshut.com. It describes how several American consumer groups have set up blogs and websites to enhance awareness about issues that companies would like to brush under the carpet.
Yellin’s examples of deficiency in service delivery — from some of the finest (FedEx) to the most-troubled companies (Comcast) — point to what quality guru Philip Crosby called non- conformance to requirements. To overcome deficiency in service, the industry worldwide invests multi-billion dollar budgets on customer care, grievance management and relationship management. The book looks at the mushrooming contact centre management industry at offshore and near-shore locations to meet the rising needs of consumers to get in touch with service providers.
The growing business process outsourcing industry can certainly pick up several lessons from a chapter devoted to staffing. Yellin’s examples bring out the need to staff these functions with carefully chosen employees, training them adequately and instilling a sense of pride in them, their work and their company. Some of the passionate customer care executives tend to stay with their company longer and rise faster.
 Emily Yellin has been 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. Yellin graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with a degree in English literature, and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. |
The author visited many contact centres around the world to capture the essence of what goes inside such centres, and her conversations with front-line executives, managers and seasoned trainers yielded plenty of insights. The message from successful companies (FedEx, Office Depot) is very clear: an irate customer wants a quick one-stop resolution of issues. Slapping a rule book in her face is not an option.
The book debates the dichotomy of driving efficiencies out of customer care function through the deployment of technology. The consumer wants to talk to a human and not a machine. The role of Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) comes in for a lot of flak.
Yellin quotes the example of a consumer fed up with having to deal with a typical IVRS that takes forever to get to an executive. The consumer went on to master the technique to reach a human voice quickly and published a guide on how to get to a human voice quickly in any one of the Fortune 500 companies.
The example of AT&T losing customers when mobile number portability was introduced in the US years ago will serve as a good lesson for the burgeoning Indian telecom industry that awaits the decision with bated breath. Coming from a background where an individual’s privacy is sacrosanct, the author has obviously not touched upon the sufferings of Indian consumers at the hands of tele-callers soliciting customers for credit cards to top-up loans. The book offers no panacea for the failed “Do Not Call” registry in India.
After reading the book, one hopes that the current slowdown will encourage Indian firms to accelerate customer satisfaction initiatives. And also not take the traditional short-sighted view of cutting down on consumer satisfaction route in the garb of enhancing returns on investments. While the telecom industry watchdog is doing its bit to get consumers the lowest telecom rates in the world, the service levels in India are plummeting to new lows, with call drops becoming frequent phenomenon.
Yellin’s long sessions at contact centres qualify her to give the Indian mobile industry leaders, perhaps, a D-minus in customer handling. Several chapters from this book are imperative reading for call-centre executives and trainers. This book is also a must-read for all CEOs, especially from the services industry.
Sanjiv Kataria is a strategic communications and PR counsel
This review was published in the Businessworld Issue Dated 5-11 May 2009
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