Your Call

"The approximate cost of offering a live, American-based, customer service agent averages somewhere around $7.50 per phone call," writes Emily Yellin in "Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us," reviewed by Barbara D. Phillips in the Wall Street Journal (3/24/09). "Outsourcing calls to live agents in another country brings the average cost down to about $2.35 per call," she continues. "Having customers take care of the problems themselves, through an automated response phone system, averages around 32 cents per call, or contact."

The real question, of course, is the cost to the brand when it cheaps out on customer service. Emily, uses a mix of facts and anecdotes to get at what it is about calling customer service. She tells the story of "Junius Harris, who spends weeks trying to get his Verizon landline number switched to his new apartment." His problem was that the previous tenants "never cancelled their account with AT&T … His Kafkaeqsue struggle ends only, when in desperation, he takes a Verizon agent’s hint and impersonates his vacationing landlord during a call to AT&T — Greek accent, broken English and all."

On the flipside is Marlene Gloudie, who, along with her husband, Tom, handles customer service calls for JetBlue out of their spare bedroom. Marlene "says she knew she was in the right place when she answered her first call," because even though it took 90 minutes to resolve the problem, "her supervisors didn’t complain. Instead, they understood they had hired the right person." This stands in stark contrast to call-center norms, where operators often are evaluated based on how many calls they dispatch, versus how many problems they solve. According to Emily, the true measures of call-center success are "trust, respect, empathy, caring and even some fun."