Books for Customer
Service and Call Center Reps

The best books for customer service and call center reps are The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Verbal Judo by George Thompson, Emotional Agility by Susan David, You Are Capable of More by Chris Sund, The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, and Working by Studs Terkel. Hochschild explains the job, Thompson helps you survive the calls.

The part of the job nobody puts in the description

Most work asks you to do something. This work asks you to feel something, or at least to produce a convincing version of it, and to keep producing it after the fourth person in an hour has told you the company is a fraud and you personally are useless.

That has a name and a literature, and almost nobody working these jobs has been pointed at it, which is a shame because the naming itself helps. It is not a character weakness that a hostile call at ten in the morning is still with you at three. It is what happens when the emotional performance is the product.

The other feature is that you are measured on things you do not control, handle time, resolution rate, a QA score assigned by somebody who listened to six minutes of a difficult call and had a rubric. So the list runs like this. One book about what the work actually is, one about the calls themselves, one about carrying it, and a few practical ones for the parts of your life the job touches.

One

The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild

This is where the term emotional labor comes from, and reading the original is worth it because the phrase has been stretched in popular use until it means almost anything. Hochschild, a sociologist, studied flight attendants and bill collectors, and her argument is precise. Some jobs require you to manage your own feelings as part of the work, and that management is labor with real costs even though nothing about it appears in a job description.

It is an academic book from 1983 and reads like one in places. It is also the single most clarifying thing you can read about this job, because it takes something you have felt and had no words for and treats it as a serious subject.

Two

Verbal Judo by George J. Thompson

The practical one. Thompson was a police officer and an English professor, and the book is about redirecting hostility rather than meeting it or absorbing it.

The core insight transfers directly to a queue. Most people escalate because they feel unheard rather than because they want a fight, and the reliable move is to demonstrate that you have understood before you explain anything about policy. His section on the phrases that reliably make things worse, particularly calm down and it is our policy, is worth the book on its own.

Three

Emotional Agility by Susan David

The book for what happens after the call. David is a psychologist, and her position is that the two common strategies both fail. Pushing a feeling away takes effort and it comes back, and being ruled by it costs you the rest of the day.

What she teaches instead is naming the feeling accurately and letting it move rather than fighting it, which sounds soft and is a specific practicable skill. It is the one this job asks for more than any other, and it is teachable. If what you are carrying has gotten heavier than a book reaches, that belongs with a person, and there is a short list of places to start on this site.

Five

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier

For the fork into team lead or QA, which usually goes to whoever had the best numbers rather than to whoever was prepared to develop people.

Bungay Stanier’s whole book is seven questions and the discipline to ask them instead of answering. The failure it fixes is the one every new lead makes, which is solving each rep’s problem yourself because it is faster this once, and then again, until nobody on your team has learned anything and you are the bottleneck. It reads in an evening.

Six

Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

On the list because a large share of this work is now done from a bedroom or a kitchen table, and nobody trained anyone for that.

Fried and Hansson wrote it before remote work became common, and the practical chapters have held up, particularly on separating work from home when they occupy the same room and on the specific isolation of a job with no colleagues to decompress with afterward. Ignore the parts arguing that companies should allow remote work, since that argument is over. Keep the parts about how to actually live it.

Seven

Working by Studs Terkel

Not a self-improvement book and the best thing on this list to read on a bad week. Terkel spent the early seventies interviewing Americans about their jobs, a switchboard operator, a receptionist, a gravedigger, and let them talk at length about what the work did to them.

It is fifty years old and it is startling how little has changed about the emotional part. There is enormous relief in reading someone from 1972 describe the exact thing you felt on Tuesday. Nothing to apply, and it does something the other six cannot.

Which one to pick

If you want one, read Verbal Judo, because it changes tomorrow. If you want the one that changes how you understand the job, read The Managed Heart.

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