FedEx CEO, Council Member Smith Interviewed About Exemplary Customer Service

The furnace had gone out on a cold November day. Emily Yellin was on the phone with a customer service agent, then another, then another. In all, it took four people before she could persuade her home warranty company to schedule a repair.

A journalist, she was taking notes, keeping track of each exasperating conversation and the names of each person who stood between her and warmth. Suddenly her frustrations crystallized: “Somebody ought to look into this, and I could be the one to do it.”

It was the beginning of a 291-page book in which Yellin looks at everything from a hammer-wielding woman who literally assaulted a Comcast branch office to how the Internet (with Web sites like Comcastmustdie.com) is forcing companies to pay attention to customer grievances.

Yellin eventually got the furnace repaired in her Midtown Memphis home, but the furnace didn’t even make it into the book.

“It’s not a book about people being angry and complaining. It’s looking at an industry that touches all of our lives and frustrates so many people,” she says.

The book, Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us, hit the bookstores last week ($26, Free Press division of Simon & Schuster).

One of the first things Yellin learned is that 70 percent of Americans who have a problem with a business are not just annoyed or irritated when they pick up the phone to get help. They have a sense of rage. Customers have come to dread picking up the phone to try to solve issues with the companies they deal with daily. “I think we as customers have sort of a collective phobia about calling customer service,” says Yellin, who tackled the problem like a fear-of-flying phobia.

Those who fear flying often are treated by teaching them everything about an airplane, including safety measures that make flying one of the safest means of transportation. Yellin would learn everything she could about customer service agents, dreaded automated-response telephone systems and being “Bangalored,” or handled by an outsourced call center.

Everyone is aware of call centers in India. She visited call centers in Argentina and Egypt. She also visited the biggest call center for FedEx, an example of a center where a top-down philosophy makes customer service absolutely positively a priority.

One of the big surprises for Yellin was the staggering volume of customer service calls.

“There are 4.9 million calls per hour every day—143 calls per year for every man, woman and child in the United States,” she says, based on a 2007 study by British consulting firm Contact Babel. “There are 10 calls per month per person. Out of those 10 calls, maybe one is horrible. We tend to let that be the one that we remember.”

The cost of handling those calls helps explain the growing use of automated response systems.

“The general number I came up with for what it costs to have a live agent answering a call is about $7,” says Yellin. “Outsourced, the cost was $2.50 versus an automated system, which costs about 32 cents.”

Yellin met the woman who helped give personality to automated response systems, a Boston voice actress who became a pop culture symbol when she became “Amtrak Julie” in 2002. The computerized version of Julie can answer about 13,972 calls a day, while a live Amtrak agent averages about 13,000 calls a year. Julie’s familiar voice begins: “OK. Let’s get started. What city are you departing from?” She has been satirized on “Saturday Night Live,” but has become a standard for modern voice-response systems.

Voice systems go back as far as the 1980s, but Julie is the product of advanced speech recognition technology, which is constantly being refined. Yellin says Julie’s responses were designed in Boston and ran into an early hitch when the system was used by Bell South for the first time.

The company that had programmed Julie taught her to understand what it thought was every version of “yes” and “no,” including uh-huh, nope, yep and other variations. But when Southern callers replied “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am,” Julie, a Yankee, was stumped. She had to be reprogrammed.

Yellin says the things that aggravate people the most about customer service tend to be “having to be on hold too long, talking to an agent who has bad English or can’t understand our English, having to navigate through an automated system when you really want to talk to a human being and being transferred all over the place.”

Cell phone and cable TV providers have been among the worst offenders, she says.

“I think with cable companies, it has to do with the monopolies they have held. With cell phone companies, I think it’s because there have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions, and it’s been hard to keep customer service consistent and good. It has not been a priority.”

Comcast, the cable giant, has generated some of the biggest customer service blunders. Mona Shaw, a 76-year-old customer in suburban Washington, spent a day waiting for Comcast to install its heavily promoted “triple-play” service at her home. The company didn’t show up until two days later. A technician left the job half done and didn’t return.

Without phone service, Shaw and her husband drove to a Comcast branch office and were told to wait outside in the August heat to see a manager. Two hours later, they were told the manager had left for the day.

Shaw concluded Comcast was “a bunch of submoronic imbeciles.” The next day she got her husband’s hammer and got him to drive her to the Comcast office again. She walked past a line of waiting customers and used the hammer to smash the keyboard of a customer service agent, knock the agent’s computer off the desk and smash the telephone.

Shaw, fined $345, was released on a three-month suspended sentence and became a TV and Internet celebrity, hailed as a folk hero. A video of her is still on the Web site comcastmustdie.com, a site created by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield, who had his own run-in with Comcast.

Garfield found irony that it was Comcast that laid the cable lines that finally led to its own comeuppance on the Internet. As customers posted horror story after horror story, Comcast was forced to scour the Internet and respond quickly in hopes of preventing more damage.

Yellin said the lesson is that customer service has to be a priority in an era of instant communication. “It can be a leading indicator of the financial health of a company.” With the Internet and social networking, a company that ignores its customers or treats them badly “does so at its own peril,” she says.

The last chapter of her book is called “Absolutely, Positively,” an homage to FedEx and its legendary determination to please its customers. She interviews FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, who says: “From the start, and carrying through to this day, the focus on customer service has been one of the critical success factors of FedEx. It was baked in from the earliest days.”

The Customer Service Institute of America named FedEx’s vice president of customer service operations the 2008 national customer service executive of the year. One of her key employees, Kathy Anderson, manager of the Memphis customer service center, says customer service is not a secret formula.

“It is being able to identify with the customer and making sure the customer knows you care,” she says. “We have to value our customers and let them know they’re important to us.”