Les O'Dell

In a fabulous book about customer service, “Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us”, author Emily Yellin shares this information which, I think, gets to the real problem of customer service in our country. She writes:

Exact figures vary by company and industry, but the approximate cost of offering a live, American-based, customer service agent averages somewhere around $7.50 per phone call. Outsourcing calls to live agents in another country brings the average cost down to about $2.35 per call.

Yet one of the most frequent complaints about telephone customer service is that the customer service agent doesn’t truly understand the language or has an accent or dialect that cannot easily be understood by the caller. So my question to corporate America is this: Isn’t a positive customer service experience and a satisfied customer worth the extra $5.15? As your customer, my answer is, “Yes. Every single time.”