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Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us

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Bring up the subject of calling customer service 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 and more inhuman and unhelpful with every encounter we have. And each American contacts customer service an average of 143 times per year, or 2 to 3 times per week.

In her engaging, funny, and far-reaching new book Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us, journalist Emily Yellin explores the inner-workings the multi-billion-dollar  customer service industry. She traverses the country and the world watching, listening, and talking to customers, customer service workers, managers, consultants and corporate CEOs at such companies as Comcast, FedEx, JetBlue, Sprint, Zappos, Amtrak, Credit Suisse, and many others. Yellin goes straight to the center of the global intersection of consumers and companies that is customer service, and finds the real human beings and often surreal corporate policies lurking behind its aggravating facade.

Yellin’s vast reporting in Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us sheds light on the complex forces that create these sometimes infuriating experiences, chronicles how the internet and competition worldwide 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 is an eye-opening and touching 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 CEOs, and caring customer service reps alike will find this lively examination of the crossroads of world commerce ”the point where businesses and their customers meet” enlightening, compelling, and useful.

Our Mothers’ War

pback_book1Acclaimed by The New York Times as an important new book, and an example of first-rate research and reporting, and by The Washington Post as, exceptionally well-written, Our Mothers’ War portrays women as equal partners in fighting and winning World War II — a war that forever transformed the way women participated in American society.

Readers will come to see the surprisingly vast scope of American women’s experiences during that pivotal era. Our Mothers’ War offers a comprehensive portrait of what American women from all walks of life were doing and thinking, on the home front and abroad.

Sparked by finding a journal and letters her mother had written home from the Pacific while serving with the Red Cross, journalist Emily Yellin embarked on a broad investigation of how the women of her mother’s generation responded to this time when their country asked them to step into roles they had never been invited, or allowed, to fill before.

Click here to visit ourmotherswar.com