We may very well be embarking on the decade of the customer. Social media, especially Twitter, has empowered customers, and the recession has reminded businesses that keeping clients is easier than bringing in new ones.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies.

Here are a few numbers from the AARP piece: According to Yellin, Americans contact customer service 143 times per year, or 2 to 3 times per week, on average. The average cost to companies with an American-based call center is about $7.50 per call. Outsourcing to another country knocks the price down to $2.35 per call, and letting customers take care of the issue themselves through an automated system drops it to about 32 cents per call.

The AARP reporter asked Yellin about the declining quality of customer service. Here’s her response: “What has happened increasingly, especially in the last five years, is that many companies haven’t paid attention to customer service and continue to view the success of a call center from their own viewpoint — as a cost whose success is based on the number of calls they can handle in an hour.”

Bingo. Just because a outsourcer can take thousands of calls a month at a bargain price doesn’t mean they can actually resolve issues. Bye-bye company cost savings, hello customer (and employee) rage.

This is where the new technology comes in. In the past, miffed customers had few outlets for their rage. Today, they have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and a horde of sites that encourage commenting and reviews. A company can only ignore criticism for so long.

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