Yellin starts yellin' for customer service

Unpopular elevator music playing on the phone combined with a seemingly never-ending wait can ignite fury in many of us at times. A victim of bad customer service, Emily Yellin wrote a book about it.

Yellin, author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us, spoke to faculty and staff members at The U of M Monday.

A broken furnace on a freezing day led Yellin to call a home warranty business and schedule a repair. While being passed around to several different customer service agents for more than an hour, Yellin recalled thinking, "Customer service doesn't care. They're doing a bad job."

Cell phones and cable companies have the worst reputations for customer service, she said.

"We've all heard 'Your call is important to us,'" she said. "But they won't let us talk to a real person. They transfer us to someone else, and they keep us on hold."

When a woman's DVR broke in Chicago, she called Comcast daily for help, Yellin said.

"This woman cooked and cleaned while on the phone for a whole month," she said.

After the problem was fixed, she received her bill, which read "Bitch Dog," Yellin said.

Comcast's customer service reputation worsened in 2007, she said, when a man came home to find a Comcast employee asleep on his couch.

"It turns out the worker was on hold with Comcast while trying to fix the TV," she said.

A woman in the D.C. area had to wait outside in August to speak to a manager about fixing her Comcast bundle package, only to be turned away at closing time, Yellin said. After spending a weekend without cable, internet or a home phone, the woman went back with a hammer and smashed a Comcast employee's computer screen, she said.

"She became a sensation," Yellin said. "Blogs really picked up on it."

Yellin said the Internet lets people fight bad customer service. Websites like Comcastmustdie.com give people a place to come together and vent, she said. Other websites are out there to facilitate the calling process, such as Gethuman.com, which has codes to direct callers to human operators for more than 900 businesses, she said.

Sharon Richardson, supervisor of supply in The U of M Physical Plant, said she also had a bad experience with Comcast.

"I am no longer a Comcast customer," she said. "I'm not going back for nothing under the sun."

Even after returning her cable equipment, Comcast continued to send bills, she said.

"(Yellin's speech) was informative and concise," Richardson said. "She referenced companies we all have to deal with."

Yellin went to call centers in Egypt and Argentina and talked to CEOs, customers and people at all levels of customer service to find out why customer service is so bad and what they're doing to improve it.

A customer rage study showed 70 percent of customers feel rage toward the companies that give them bad customer service, Yellin said. She also learned 57 percent decide to stop doing business with the company, 8 percent curse, 15 percent want revenge and 1 percent report getting revenge.

"If I start getting angry, I warn them and say, 'I'm about to get really angry. I know this isn't about us, but we've been put in this position,'" she said. "I go back and think, 'Why did I act that way? I don't treat anybody that way.'"

Yellin said the U.S. has been moving from a manufacturing to service economy, while being set up for manufacturing is another cause of the problem.

"We shouldn't let customer service be marginalized," Yellin said. "We should hold these companies accountable because we will all benefit from better customer service."

Exceptional customer service exists, Yellin said. Using FedEx as an example, she said companies must place more emphasis on their "karma footprint."

"In the FedEx call center, when agents answer the phone their greeting is recorded," she said.  "You hear agents say it, but they aren't really saying it. Some agents have been there 15 or 20 years - and that's abnormal - but you really have to look at how a company treats its employees."

Good customer service can really differentiate a business from others, said Brian Janz, management information systems professor at The U of M.

"Dr. Raines said we need to focus on and improve our customer service skills in every area," he said. "It's an easy way to set yourself apart."