Is Your Customer’s Call Important to Your Company?

How many times have you been put on hold with the recorded message: “Your call is very important to us”? Last week I read about a book called Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us by Emily Yellin, a journalist who has frequently written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and other publications. She knows all about the frustrations of those of us who feel like we’ve been taken advantage of. The review was on Brent’s CRM Blog and was entitled appropriately Is Your Customer’s Call Really All THAT Important to You.

Did you realize that Americans make an estimated 43 billion customer service calls each year? That means each American makes two to three calls to a customer service call center every week! And how many times do you make a call only to get put on music and told repeatedly “your call is important to us”? According to Yellin 67 percent of Americans sometimes have to “make a fuss to get a problem resolved.”

Ms. Yellin decided to write the book while waiting on hold one day in her freezing cold house, only to argue on the phone for hours with customer service at a home warranty company before convincing someone to come fix her broken furnace. While the book is written with humor, Emily shares great insights from her conversations with Fedex CEO Fred Smith and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. She talks about the Customer Rage study. And she explains what surprised her as she visited call centers in Egypt and Argentina.

Good customer service, according to Smith of FedEx is “baked in from the start” which Yellin says is much better than “just sprinkling customer service on top after the whole thing is already cooked.” Smith elaborates by explaining that his company spends an “inordinate amount of time asking their customers what constitutes an outstanding experience and what meets their expectations.” He feels that problems usually come down to one of three things:

• The customer service person does not have the information to deal with the problem.
• The customer service person has the information but does not have the authority to do what needs to be done.
• The customer service person expresses no empathy for the customer’s situation.

It is an eye-opening account of how companies treat their customers, how customers treat the people who serve them, and how technology, globalization, class, race, gender, and culture influence these interactions. For example, Pablo who is a supervisor of a call center in Buenos Aires does not understand Americans calling to complain about a delivery that is a half-hour late. Delivery times and dates have no meaning whatsoever in Argentina.

The Wall Street Journal describes Ms. Yellin’s book as ‘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?’

Tags: CRM, Customer call, Customer Relations, Help Desk, helpdesk