The Circle

by Dave Eggers

  “Okay. That’s a little strange, given I’ve never met him. But tell him I love him too. Passionately. Is he hot? A silver fox? A swinger? Maybe we can work something out. Now can we get to work around here?”

  “Yup, yup,” Mae said, sitting down again. “Sorry.”

  Annie arched her eyebrows mischievously. “I feel like school’s about to start and we just found out we got put in the same homeroom. They give you a new tablet?”

  “Just now.”

  “Let me see.” Annie inspected it. “Ooh, the engraving is a nice touch. We’re going to get in such trouble together, aren’t we?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Okay, here comes your team leader. Hi Dan.”

  Mae rushed to wipe any moisture from her face. She looked past Annie to see a handsome man, compact and tidy, approaching. He wore a brown hoodie and a smile of great contentment.

  “Hi Annie, how are you?” he said, shaking her hand.

  “Good, Dan.”

  “I’m so glad, Annie.”

  “You got a good one here, I hope you know,” Annie said, grabbing Mae’s wrist and squeezing.

  “Oh I do know,” he said.

  “You watch out for her.”

  “I will,” he said, and turned from Annie to Mae. His smile of contentment grew into something like absolute certainty.

  “I’ll be watching you watch her,” Annie said.

  “Glad to know it,” he said.

  “See you at lunch,” Annie said to Mae, and was gone.

  Everyone but Mae and Dan had left, but his smile hadn’t changed—it was the smile of a man who did not smile for show. It was the smile of a man who was exactly where he wanted to be. He pulled up a chair.

  “So good to see you here,” he said. “I’m very glad you accepted our offer.”

  Mae looked into his eyes for signs of disingenuousness, given there was no rational person who would have declined an invitation to work here. But there was nothing like that. Dan had interviewed her three times for the job, and had seemed unshakably sincere each time.

  “So I assume all the paperwork and fingerprints are done?”

  “I think so.”

  “Like to take a walk?”

  They left her desk and, after a hundred yards of glass hallway, walked through high double doors and into the open air. They climbed a wide stairway.

  “We just finished the roofdeck,” he said. “I think you’ll like it.”

  When they reached the top of the stairs, the view was spectacular. The roof overlooked most of the campus, the surrounding city of San Vincenzo and the bay beyond. Mae and Dan took it all in, and then he turned to her.

  “Mae, now that you’re aboard, I wanted to get across some of the core beliefs here at the company. And chief among them is that just as important as the work we do here—and that work is very important—we want to make sure that you can be a human being here, too. We want this to be a workplace, sure, but it should also be a humanplace. And that means the fostering of community. In fact, it must be a community. That’s one of our slogans, as you probably know: Community First. And you’ve seen the signs that say Humans Work Here—I insist on those. That’s my pet issue. We’re not automatons. This isn’t a sweatshop. We’re a group of the best minds of our generation. Generations. And making sure this is a place where our humanity is respected, where our opinions are dignified, where our voices are heard—this is as important as any revenue, any stock price, any endeavor undertaken here. Does that sound corny?”

  “No, no,” Mae rushed to say. “Definitely not. That’s why I’m here. I love the ‘community first’ idea. Annie’s been telling me about it since she started. At my last job, no one really communicated very well. It was basically the opposite of here in every way.”

  Dan turned to look into the hills to the east, covered in mohair and patches of green. “I hate hearing that kind of thing. With the technology available, communication should never be in doubt. Understanding should never be out of reach or anything but clear. It’s what we do here. You might say it’s the mission of the company—it’s an obsession of mine, anyway. Communication. Understanding. Clarity.”

  Dan nodded emphatically, as if his mouth had just uttered, independently, something that his ears found quite profound.

  “In the Renaissance, as you know, we’re in charge of the customer experience, CE, and some people might think that’s the least sexy part of this whole enterprise. But as I see it, and the Wise Men see it, it’s the foundation of everything that happens here. If we don’t give the customers a satisfying, human and humane experience, then we have no customers. It’s pretty elemental. We’re the proof that this company is human.”

  Mae didn’t know what to say. She agreed completely. Her last boss, Kevin, couldn’t talk like this. Kevin had no philosophy. Kevin had no ideas. Kevin had only his odors and his mustache. Mae was grinning like an idiot.

  “I know you’ll be great here,” he said, and his arm extended toward her, as if he wanted to put his palm on her shoulder but thought against it. His hand fell to his side. “Let’s go downstairs and you can get started.”

  They left the roofdeck and descended the wide stairs. They returned to her desk, where they saw a fuzzy-haired man.

  “There he is,” Dan said. “Early as always. Hi Jared.”

  Jared’s face was serene, unlined, his hands resting patiently and unmoving in his ample lap. He was wearing khaki pants and a button-down shirt a size too small.

  “Jared will be doing your training, and he’ll be your main contact here at CE. I oversee the team, and Jared oversees the unit. So we’re the two main names you’ll need to know. Jared, you ready to get Mae started?”

  “I am,” he said. “Hi Mae.” He stood, extended his hand, and Mae shook it. It was rounded and soft, like a cherub’s.

  Dan said goodbye to both of them and left.

  Jared grinned and ran a hand through his fuzzy hair. “So, training time. You feel ready?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You need coffee or tea or anything?”

  Mae shook her head. “I’m all set.”

  “Good. Let’s sit down.”

  Mae sat down, and Jared pulled his chair next to hers.

  “Okay. As you know, for now you’re just doing straight-up customer maintenance for the smaller advertisers. They send a message to Customer Experience, and it gets routed to one of us. Random at first, but once you start working with a customer, that customer will continue to be routed to you, for the sake of continuity. When you get the query, you figure out the answer, you write them back. That’s the core of it. Simple enough in theory. So far so good?”

  Mae nodded, and he went through the twenty most common requests and questions, and showed her a menu of boilerplate responses.

  “Now, that doesn’t mean you just paste the answer in and send it back. You should make each response personal, specific. You’re a person, and they’re a person, so you shouldn’t be imitating a robot, and you shouldn’t treat them like they’re robots. Know what I mean? No robots work here. We never want the customer to think they’re dealing with a faceless entity, so you should always be sure to inject humanity into the process. That sound good?”

  Mae nodded. She liked that: No robots work here.

  They went through a dozen or so practice scenarios, and Mae polished her answers a bit more each time. Jared was a patient trainer, and walked her through every customer eventuality. In the event that she was stumped, she could bounce the query to his own queue, and he’d take it. That’s what he did most of the day, Jared said—take and answer the stumpers from the junior Customer Experience reps.

  “But those will be pretty rare. You’d be surprised at how many of the questions you’ll be able to field right away. Now let’s say you’ve answered a client’s question, and they seem satisfied. That’s when you send them the survey, and they fill it out. It’s a set of quick questions about your service, their overall experience,
and at the end they’re asked to rate it. They send the questions back, and then you immediately know how you did. The rating pops up here.”

  He pointed to the corner of her screen, where there was a large number, 99, and below, a grid of other numbers.

  “The big 99 is the last customer’s rating. The customer will rate you on a scale of, guess what, 1 to 100. That most recent rating will pop up here, and then that’ll be averaged with the rest of the day’s scores in this next box. That way you’ll always know how you’re doing, recently and generally. Now, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Okay, Jared, what kind of average is average?’ And the answer is, if it dips below 95, then you might step back and see what you can do better. Maybe you bring the average up with the next customer, maybe you see how you might improve. Now, if it’s consistently slumping, then you might have a meet-up with Dan or another team leader to go over some best practices. Sound good?”

  “It does,” Mae said. “I really appreciate this, Jared. In my previous job, I was in the dark about where I stood until, like, quarterly evaluations. It was nerve-wracking.”

  “Well, you’ll love this then. If they fill out the survey and do the rating, and pretty much everyone does, then you send them the next message. This one thanks them for filling out the survey, and it encourages them to tell a friend about the experience they just had with you, using the Circle’s social media tools. Ideally they at least zing it or give you a smile or a frown. In a best-case scenario, you might get them to zing about it or write about it on another customer-service site. We get people out there zinging about their great customer service experiences with you, then everyone wins. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, let’s do a live one. Ready?”

  Mae wasn’t, but couldn’t say that. “Ready.”

  Jared brought up a customer request, and after reading it, let out a quick snort to indicate its elementary nature. He chose a boilerplate answer, adapted it a bit, told the customer to have a fantastic day. The exchange took about ninety seconds, and two minutes later, the screen confirmed the customer had answered the questionnaire, and a score appeared: 99. Jared sat back and turned to Mae.

  “Now, that’s good, right? Ninety-nine is good. But I can’t help wondering why it wasn’t a 100. Let’s look.” He opened up the customer’s survey answers and scanned through. “Well, there’s no clear sign that any part of their experience was unsatisfactory. Now, most companies would say, Wow, 99 out of 100 points, that’s nearly perfect. And I say, exactly: it’s nearly perfect, sure. But at the Circle, that missing point nags at us. So let’s see if we can get to the bottom of it. Here’s a follow-up that we send out.”

  He showed her another survey, this one shorter, asking the customer what about their interaction could have been improved and how. They sent it to the customer.

  Seconds later, the response came back. “All was good. Sorry. Should have given you a 100. Thanks!!”

  Jared tapped the screen and gave a thumbs-up to Mae.

  “Okay. Sometimes you might just encounter someone who isn’t really sensitive to the metrics. So it’s good to ask them, to make sure you get that clarity. Now we’re back to a perfect score. You ready to do your own?”

  “I am.”

  They downloaded another customer query, and Mae scrolled through the boilerplates, found the appropriate answer, personalized it, and sent it back. When the survey came back, her rating was 100.

  Jared seemed briefly taken aback. “First one you get 100, wow,” he said. “I knew you’d be good.” He had lost his footing, but now regained it. “Okay, I think you’re ready to take on some more. Now, a couple more things. Let’s turn on your second screen.” He turned on a smaller screen to her right. “This one is for intra-office messaging. All Circlers send messages out through your main feed, but they appear on the second screen. This is to make clear the importance of the messages, and to help you delineate which is which. From time to time you’ll see messages from me over here, just checking in or with some adjustment or news. Okay?”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, remember to bounce any stumpers to me, and if you need to stop and talk, you can shoot me a message, or stop by. I’m just down the hall. I expect you to be in touch pretty frequently for the first few weeks, one way or the other. That’s how I know you’re learning. So don’t hesitate.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Great. Now, are you ready to get started-started?”

  “I am.”

  “Okay. That means I open the chute. And when I release this deluge on you, you’ll have your own queue, and you’ll be inundated for the next two hours, till lunch. You ready?”

  Mae felt she was. “I am.”

  “Are you sure? Okay then.”

  He activated her account, gave her a mock-salute, and left. The chute opened, and in the first twelve minutes, she answered four requests, her score at 96. She was sweating heavily, but the rush was electric.

  A message from Jared appeared on her second screen. Great so far! Let’s see if we can get that up to 97 soon.

  I will! she wrote.

  And send follow-ups to the sub-100s.

  Okay, she wrote.

  She sent out seven follow-ups, and three customers adjusted their scores to 100. She answered another ten questions by 11:45. Now her aggregate was 98.

  Another message appeared on her second screen, this one from Dan. Fantastic work, Mae! How you feeling?

  Mae was astonished. A team leader who checked in with you, and so kindly, on the first day?

  Fine. Thanks! she wrote back, and brought up the next customer request.

  Another message from Jared appeared below the first.

  Anything I can do? Questions I can answer?

  No thanks! she wrote. I’m all set for now. Thanks, Jared! She returned to the first screen. Another message from Jared popped up on the second.

  Remember that I can only help if you tell me how.

  Thanks again! she wrote.

  By lunch she had answered thirty-six requests and her score was at 97.

  A message from Jared came through. Well done! Let’s follow up on any remaining sub-100s.

  Will do, she answered, and sent out the follow-ups to those she hadn’t already handled. She brought a few 98s to 100 and then saw a message from Dan: Great work, Mae!

  Seconds later, a second-screen message, this one from Annie, appeared below Dan’s: Dan says you’re kicking ass. That’s my girl!

  And then a message told her she’d been mentioned on Zing. She clicked over to read it. It was written by Annie. Newbie Mae is kicking ass! She’d sent it out to the rest of the Circle campus—10,041 people.

  The zing was forwarded 322 times and there were 187 follow-up comments. They appeared on her second screen in an ever-lengthening thread. Mae didn’t have time to read them all, but she scrolled quickly through, and the validation felt good. At the end of the day, Mae’s score was 98. Congratulatory messages arrived from Jared and Dan and Annie. A series of zings followed, announcing and celebrating what Annie called the highest score of any CE newb ever of all time suck it.

  By her first Friday Mae had served 436 customers and had memorized the boilerplates. Nothing surprised her anymore, though the variation in customers and their businesses was dizzying. The Circle was everywhere, and though she’d known this for years, intuitively, hearing from these people, the businesses counting on the Circle to get the word out about their products, to track their digital impact, to know who was buying their wares and when—it became real on a very different level. Mae now had customer contacts in Clinton, Louisiana, and Putney, Vermont; in Marmaris, Turkey and Melbourne and Glasgow and Kyoto. Invariably they were polite in their queries—the legacy of TruYou—and gracious in their ratings.

  By midmorning that Friday, her aggregate for the week was at 97, and the affirmations were coming from everyone in the Circle. The work was demanding, and the flow did not stop, but it varied just enough,
and the validation was frequent enough, that she settled into a comfortable rhythm.

  Just as she was about to take another request, a text came through her phone. It was Annie: Eat with me, fool.

  They sat on a low hill, two salads between them, the sun making intermittent appearances behind slow-moving clouds. Mae and Annie watched a trio of young men, pale and dressed like engineers, attempting to throw a football.

  “So you’re already a star. I feel like a proud mama.”

  Mae shook her head. “I’m not at all. I have a lot to learn.”

  “Of course you do. But a 97 so far? That’s insane. I didn’t get above 95 the first week. You’re a natural.”

  A pair of shadows darkened their lunch.

  “Can we meet the newbie?”

  Mae looked up, shielding her eyes.

  “Course,” Annie said.

  The shadows sat down. Annie jabbed her fork at them. “This is Sabine and Josef.”

  Mae shook their hands. Sabine was blond, sturdy, squinting. Josef was thin, pale, with comically bad teeth.

  “Already she’s looking at my teeth!” he wailed, pointing to Mae. “You Americans are obsessed! I feel like a horse at an auction.”

  “But your teeth are bad,” Annie said. “And we have such a good dental plan here.”

  Josef unwrapped a burrito. “I think my teeth provide a necessary respite from the eerie perfection of everyone else’s.”

  Annie tilted her head, studying him. “I’m sure you should fix them, if not for you for the sake of company morale. You give people nightmares.”

  Josef pouted theatrically, his mouth full of carne asada. Annie patted his arm.

  Sabine turned to Mae. “So you’re in Customer Experience?” Now Mae noticed the tattoo on Sabine’s arm, the symbol for infinity.

  “I am. First week.”

  “I saw you’re doing pretty well so far. I started there, too. Just about everyone did.”

  “And Sabine’s a biochemist,” Annie added.

  Mae was surprised. “You’re a biochemist?”

  “I am.”

  Mae hadn’t heard about biochemists working at the Circle. “Can I ask what you’re working on?”