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

Emily Yellin, author of Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives, is a fascinating person. 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. Her new book is a modern, humorous, and engaging account of the customer service industry today. In this interview Yellin gives me surprising and counterintuitive insights into her in-the-trenches customer service research.

Emily can you tell us about your background and what inspired you to write the book Your Call is (not that) Important to Us?

I have been a journalist for many years. My first book, Our Mothers’ War was published in 2004. Before that, I covered the southeastern United States for the New York Times. I have a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University, and have also worked in radio, magazines, Broadway theater and briefly in corporate communications and advertising. In my writing, I like to give voice to people, places, and issues that tend to be marginalized in our society. So I wrote a book about the entire female gender during WWII, and I reported on the southern part of the United States. In this case, I was interested in the customer service industry because I think it has been marginalized within the corporate world. And so, in effect, have customers.

The specific moment that inspired me to write this book was one of my own bad experiences calling customer service. Sitting on hold one day during a particularly upsetting encounter with my home warranty company, the journalist in me realized there was a story there. I couldn’t believe that the heads of customer service at all these companies went to work each day wanting to do a bad job. But in my mind, and the minds of many of their customers, that is exactly what was happening. So I set out to look at the industry from as many angles as I could to try and understand what was going on.

Can you talk about the Get Human movement and the impact of this group?

Paul English is a tech industry entrepreneur and runs the travel site Kayak.com. In 2005, he was helping his elderly father try to navigate through a phone tree. He ended up having to do most all of his dad’s calling himself, because it was too hard for his dad to deal with all the prompts to get to a human being who could help him. That is when he got the idea for his web site, GetHuman.com. On the site, he and a team of volunteers figured out and published the combination of numbers to press and words to say to get a human being on the phone at hundreds of large companies. He struck a chord and got a lot of coverage in the news media. His site got millions of visitors. And it is still up and running.

In 2006, he was a keynote speaker at SpeechTek, a large conference for the speech technology industry, which includes the creators of interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The next year, there was a breakout session at the conference called, “Is Paul English Right?” which I wrote about in the book. He has sparked lively conversation in the industry. He got the attention of many who create the systems and was a force for good. But I am not sure the customer-focused Get Human message has yet reached the top corporate executives who make the strategic decisions about deploying those systems.

You wrote that in 2009 industry will spend around 2.7 billion dollars on speech recognition technology. What are your predictions for how the increase in Interactive Voice Recognition technology (IVR) will change the call center environment?

At this moment, so much is up in the air, because of the economy. For the book, I interviewed people who are far more informed than I am and who could probably make more accurate predictions that would exactly answer your question. But I can tell you my own opinion, based on all I have read , seen and heard . I think customer service call centers are having to play catch up because of the transformation that the internet and social networking has had on how companies and customers communicate. IVR systems are fine as one tool, as long as they are well-designed with the customer’s needs at the forefront. One of the reasons that customers universally hate those systems is because so many seemed designed with the company’s needs in mind, not the customer’s.

People feel thwarted by those systems, not helped. People want to get their needs met as quickly and efficiently as possible. But they also want to feel that the companies where they spend their money care about them. So no matter how much the company’s executives believe that they are doing a responsible thing by saving money with IVR systems, they can find themselves negating those savings by having systems in place that make customers feel like they are being kept at bay, ignored, or disrespected. Customers who feel that way, will take their money somewhere else if they can. Or they can cause PR nightmares for companies on the internet.

Your discussion of anthropomorphic machines is really fascinating. Can you talk about how companies will improve the human quality of these automated machines?

The bottom line is that the technology for creating human-like machines is evolving rapidly. But it is still not equal to the experience of talking to a real human being. Everyone admits that. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, said his company would not use automated agents until they could equal a human. So when you call Zappos, you only have to listen to three options for routing before you get to a human being.

Still, I do see that when a company has to answer hundreds of thousands of calls per day and millions per year, automated systems are just about the only way to pick up on the first ring, and route calls to the right place. And for things like getting a credit card balance most people would rather deal with an automated system. They also save agents from the most tedious, repetitive work. The trouble starts when we know we need a human and the machine is not letting us get to one.

If I had to name one thing I heard across the board about customer service it was that doing it right demands that agents be empathetic. Computers can’t be empathetic, can they? The scientists behind artificial intelligence have done amazing things in the past few years in teach computers to think like humans, and in teaching them to speak, listen and comprehend human speech. And some interesting work is also being done in teaching computers to feel. Maybe when computers can also learn to be empathetic, is when customers will not revile automated systems so much.

There was an interesting concept that Steve Springer at Nuance Communications (one of the largest creators of voice response systems) shared with me. It is called the “uncanny valley.” To summarize, it is based on studies by a Japanese scientist who found that people will accept a machine acting like a human up to a point. But if it gets too human-like and yet is still not human, it creeps people out, like Zombies do. That is the point in the graph charting people’s rising comfort level with human-like machines that shows a dramatic drop, as if it fell off a cliff, into the uncanny valley.

You write that speech analytics technology is very up and coming. Can you explain some of the pros and cons about speech analytics technology?

When I first heard about this technology it sounded sinister. It was first developed for the National Security Agency and the CIA to monitor international phone lines for terrorist activity. But the customer service industry has used it for more benign purposes. We have all heard the message that says our calls are being recorded for “quality assurance purposes.” Most companies do use those recordings for training and retraining of agents. But increasingly, they are also doing what is called “data mining” to search out trends in what customers are saying to agents. Some of the most sophisticated technology can detect emotions of customers through the voice patterns and tone of what they are saying.

If you get 50 million calls per year, it is impossible for human beings to listen to all of those calls and to chart and report on trends in the calls. That is where computers are aiding companies in hearing their customers. In many ways, it is a positive thing. Because it helps companies realize that customer service is a goldmine for information that can improve their operations, sales, marketing and financial performance. For example, customer service can be a leading indicator of the financial health of a company. There are examples in my book of customer service people knowing a company was losing customers in droves, before anyone else in the company had an inkling, and way before the stock price showed a problem. Customer service really is the number one listening post for companies. And speech analytics technology is a powerful tool for those companies that want to hear the truth about what they are doing right and wrong directly from their customers.

Can you describe “homesourcing” and talk about its significance?

Homesourcing is a trend that has great potential to improve customer service. There are a combination of elements right now that make it viable. Homesourcing is in part an antidote to outsourcing, and the backlash against foreign agents answering our calls. It is also a way to cut the overhead of a call center, and use agents who tend to be older, more experienced and more committed than those who typically work in outsourced call centers. Turnover is lower and workers are often happier. Also, it is greener, since the workers don’t have to commute. And finally, the technology now makes it all possible in ways that it wasn’t just a few years ago.

I visited JetBlue, which was a pioneer of homesourcing and they have really figured out how to make it work. I met agents working from home, including a husband and wife who answer JetBlue’s calls side-by-side in their spare bedroom in Salt Lake City.

You talk about call center culture in the book and you take us on a journey from Utah to Argentina to Egypt and India. What was the process like of capturing these stories and what were some reactions you have had to the stories captured in the book?

The status of customer service within a company, and the way a company treats its customer service workers becomes  the way a company treats its customers. A company has to have a firm commitment to customer service “baked in” to its culture at all levels, as Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, says in my book, to really have it permeate through to customers in a consistent way. That is what I saw at all the call centers I visited, whether in this country or abroad.

Spending time in call centers in the US and Britain, and in Africa and Latin America taught me a lot about the differences between the developed world and the developing world and how we see each other. Through a series of serendipitous connections — including my niece, who was studying in Buenos Aires that year, and a really smart PR executive — I got to go to Argentina and meet Pablo. He was a supervisor who had handled my own call, after an order from Office Depot I had made online didn’t arrive on time. He worked for TeleTech, a large outsourcing company based in Denver.

When I walked into the conference room of that call center, with all its top executives there to meet with me, I saw Pablo, who I had spoken to six months before. Pablo had been answering phone calls from Americans for two-and-a-half years and had been very helpful to me. I looked at him, smiled, and greeted him like an old friend. He looked at me, and said, “I’ve never met a customer before.” That was emblematic of how disconnected we have become from each other in one way, but also how amazingly connected we are in another way. Because it turned out one of Pablo’s employees was a friend of my niece.

Customer service lines are a crossroads of global business, bridging differences in class, region, nation, gender, religion, race and levels of education. How we communicate in call centers is an amazing barometer of how we treat each other in public every day. It is not always nice. But we are still evolving. Companies who take that communication seriously and value it are the ones I think will survive and thrive in the future.

People who work in call centers and people who only have the experience of being customers have both told me that the book has validated their experiences and has helped them have more empathy for the people on the other end of the line. That was one of my main goals in writing this book. So I am glad for that.

For more on Emily Yellin please visit her website at www.EmilyYellin.com.

Emily Yellin is the author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us (Free Press 2009) and Our Mothers’ War (Free Press 2004), and was 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.