Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us: Interview with Author Emily Yellin

Emily Yellin knows customer service, specifically what it reveals about our world and our lives. In her book Your Call is (Not That) Important To Us, Yellin reminds us that when you bring up the subject of customer service phone calls, the blood pressure of everyone within an earshot rises exponentially. Otherwise calm, rational and intelligent people go off on extended rants about an industry that seems to grow more inhuman and unhelpful with every phone call. In this interview Yellin cuts through the corporate jargon and consumer distress to provide a candid account of customer management today. Yellin went to the ends of the earth to give an accurate and transparent account of what was really going on behind the scenes of the customer service industry. She says she was sitting on hold one day during an upsetting encounter with her home warranty company, and the journalist in her realized there was a story there. She couldn’t believe that the heads of customer service at all these companies went to work each day wanting to do a bad job. She set out to look at the industry from as many angles as she could to try and understand what was going on. Her new book is a modern, humorous and engaging account of the customer service industry today. In this interview Yellin gives surprising and counterintuitive insights into her in-the-trenches customer service research. She also discusses some humorous impersonations of speech recognition technology including Amtrak Julie on Saturday Night Live. Yellin gives a fair account of customer service and contact center issues. She has interviewed hundreds of people in the trenches at the corporations, call center representatives, customers and everyone in between.