Bring up the subject of customer service phone calls and the blood pressure of everyone within earshot rises exponentially. Otherwise calm, rational, and intelligent people go into extended rants about an industry that seems to grow more inhuman and unhelpful with every phone call we make. And Americans make more than 43 billion customer service calls each year. Whether it's the interminable hold times, the outsourced agents who can't speak English, or the multitude of buttons to press and automated voices to listen to before reaching someone with a measurable pulse -- who hasn't felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and wasted time we experience when all we want is help, and maybe a little human kindness? Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us is journalist Emily Yellin's engaging, funny, and far-reaching exploration of the multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its surprising inner-workings. Yellin reveals the real human beings and often surreal corporate policies lurking behind its aggravating façade. After reading this first-ever investigation of the customer service world, you'll never view your call-center encounters in quite the same way. Since customer service has a role in just about every industry on earth, Yellin travels the country and the world, meeting a wide range of customer service reps, corporate decision makers, industry watchers, and Internet-based consumer activists. She spends time at outsourced call centers for Office Depot in Argentina and Microsoft in Egypt. She gets to know the Mormon wives who answer JetBlue's customer service calls from their homes in Salt Lake City, and listens in on calls from around the globe at a FedEx customer service center in Memphis. She meets with the creators of the yearly Customer Rage Study, customer experience specialists at Credit Suisse in Zurich, the founder and CEO of FedEx, and the CEO of the rising Internet retailer Zappos.com. Yellin finds out which country complains about service the most (Sweden), interviews an actress who provides the voice for automated answering systems at many big corporations, and talks to the people who run a website (GetHuman.com that posts codes for bypassing automated voices and getting to an actual human being at more than five hundred major companies. Yellin weaves her vast reporting into an entertaining narrative that sheds light on the complex forces that create our infuriating experiences. She chronicles how the Internet and global competition are forcing businesses to take their customers' needs more seriously and offers hope from people inside and outside the globalized corporate world fighting to make customer service better for us all. Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us cuts through corporate jargon and consumer distress to provide an eye-opening and animated account of the way companies treat their customers, how customers treat the people who serve them, and how technology, globalization, class, race, gender, and culture influence these interactions. Frustrated customers, smart executives, and dedicated customer service reps alike will find this lively examination of the crossroads of world commerce -- the point where businesses and their customers meet -- illuminating and essential.

Journalist Emily Yellin pens a lively narrative exploring the very human stories behind the often-inhuman face of call-center customer service. Whether it’s the interminable hold times, the multitude of buttons to press, or the automated voices before reaching someone with a measurable pulse—who hasn’t felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and wasted time when all we want is help, and maybe a little human kindness? Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us is journalist Emily Yellin’s highly entertaining and far-reaching exploration of the multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its surprising inner-workings. Since customer service has a role in just about every industry on earth, Yellin travels the country and the world, meeting a wide range of customer service reps, corporate decision makers, industry watchers, and Internet-based consumer activists. She shows the myriad forces that converge to create these aggravating experiences and the people inside and outside the globalized corporate world crusading to make customer service better for us all. For the first time, Yellin gets reveals the heart behind the never-seen faces of call-center customer service—and why customer service doesn’t have to be this bad.

Ever been left spluttering over some fatuous fib trying to pass itself off as information, even as fact? Of course you have. We all have. It's bullshit, and as Laura Penny sees it, we're drowning in the stuff. Your Call Is Important to Us is Penny's brilliant take on the "all-you-can-eat buffet of phoniness" that is our lives today. "We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production," Penny says. While bullshit is not new, more money, more media, and more people at mics have led to a bullshit pandemic. Today, we are so used to exaggeration and obfuscation we rarely notice them any more.Thank goodness we have Penny as our witty, smart-aleck guide through the phoniness of advertising and public relations, the claptrap of big pharma, the gobbledygook of the media, and the poppycock of the service industry. Along the way, Penny takes direct aim at the major culprits and the insidious ways they distort reality. As scathing as Michael Moore, as incisive as Naomi Klein, and as funny as Al Franken, Penny's take on the bullshit factor in modern life is a page-turner. Penny has a cheeky riff on that revealing question: "If my call is so important," she asks, "why doesn't anyone answer the damn phone?"

All of us have a yearning to understand where we belong in this world. As Christians, most of us understand from Scripture that God has a purpose for each of us and has gifted us differently. But discovering our unique giftedness and where God calls us to use those gifts eludes so many. In his new book, Discover Your Calling: The ABC of Vocational Discernment, Soo-Inn Tan provides biblical and down-to-earth support for those who seek to better understand how God is shaping their lives. Whether you’re a student, entering the workforce, a homemaker, a mid-career worker, or a retiree, discover how God may be preparing you for the continuing challenge and joy of a lifelong walk with Jesus Christ across all aspects of vocation.

A selection of the best of dozens of columns Bruce Pilgrim has published on his website since 2001, Talking to My Cats is a wry look at running a small business, creative work in general, and the follies of corporate life.

The A-to-Z guide to spotting and fixing usability problems Frustrated by pop-ups? Forms that make you start over if you miss a field? Nonsensical error messages? You're not alone! This book helps you simply get it right the first time (or fix what's broken). Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user's needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user's expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user's experience. World-renowned UX guru Eric Reiss shares his knowledge from decades of experience making products useable for everyone...all in an engaging, easy-to-apply manner. Reveals proven tools that simply make products better, from the users' perspective Provides simple guidelines and checklists to help you evaluate and improve your own products Zeroes in on essential elements to consider when planning a product, such as its functionality and responsiveness, whether or not it is ergonomic, making it foolproof, and more Addresses considerations for product clarity, including its visibility, understandability, logicalness, consistency, and predictability Usable Usability walks you through numerous techniques that will help ensure happy customers and successful products!

Although 70% of the customer's decision to buy is based on how they are treated as people, few ornganizations have recognized its importance as well as understanding how to implement the "human touch" art as a science. John McKean provides a practical guide to implementing this art as consistent, business-wide, technology-enabled science drawn form proven approaches from world-class human touch practitioners.

Glebe, an unlikely hero, scores big for the little guy as Glebe tweets his way to becoming the voice of the people in a witty tale so unlikely, that it is totally plausible, definitely relevant, and very funny. A quirky, ex-adman, Glebe teams up with Hartwick, a black homeless gent, to create the consumer revolution that topples once powerful businesses. He just asked people 'if you could change one thing, what would that be?' and tweeted his way to changing the world. And his target included everything from dumb advertising, to incessant telephone calls, the economy, the government and everything else that people were once powerless to impact. Glebe did what you would have done if you had thought of it and were quirky and passionate and wanted to just make a diff.

The way businesses buy from one another has changed profoundly in recent years. Markets have evolved, disruptive technologies have sprung up and buyers’ expectations have changed. But despite this, the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing have remained constant: today’s corporate decision-makers still need to know who you are, what you do and why you matter to them. In Business-to-Business Marketing, Mark Eardley and Charlie Stewart review the basic rules of B2B marketing. They offer guidance on how to motivate your markets to buy from you, how to differentiate yourself from your competitors and explain which tactics to use to reach your customers with the right messages at the right time. Their step-by-step guide will help your marketing effort deliver three critical results – increased sales, rising market share and rock-solid margins. Written in straightforward, punchy language with simple, practical take outs at the end of each chapter, this is a must-have book for anyone involved – in any way at all – with attracting and retaining profitable customers.

A 13-point manifesto for a new financial services marketing model Anthony Thomson knows a thing or two about new and disruptive financial services, having co-founded and chaired first the ground-breaking Metro Bank and then the purely digital, app-based Atom Bank. And as a financial services marketing specialist for over 30 years, Lucian Camp has helped develop more new and innovative financial services propositions than anyone. Now they’ve put their heads together to write No Small Change, a passionate, opinionated and practical manifesto arguing that the fast-changing financial services world urgently needs to rethink the whole of its approach to marketing. Most of all, they propose that an increasingly digital, fintech-driven industry needs not just more marketing, but also better marketing to make sure it’s successfully identifying consumers’ real needs, and finding powerful and successful ways to engage with them. After detailing the forces of change that demand a new approach, the book then examines in 13 chapters what the key components of that new approach should look like. It takes a broad and multi-faceted perspective, exploring areas as diverse as the crisis of consumer trust, the ever-growing power of Big Data, the importance of leadership and corporate culture and the rapid advance in thinking based on Behavioural Economics. In developing these themes, the authors don’t pull their punches. The book is fiercely critical of some of the industry’s long-established marketing habits, providing compelling reasons why it’s time to abandon the practices that have given it a bad name. Marketers will applaud, but the book is also intended for a broader audience. Thomson and Camp challenge senior management in financial firms to appreciate the real value that marketers can bring to shaping the business agenda at the highest level, and not just to label marketing with that tired old phrase “the colouring-in department.” Rich in anecdotes, comments from leading industry figures, personal experiences on the part of both authors and findings from original research, No Small Change is an entertaining and rewarding read – and, at this point in the development of financial services, a timely and important one.