It’s hard to do business in 21st century America without encountering a call center. If you’re like me, more often than not this turns out to be a less-than-satisfactory experience, talking with some company’s outsourced workforce that is struggling mightily to help you from some foreign land many time zones away.

In April I had to rebook my son’s air travel from California to Germany because of the backlog in the U.S. Passport Services Office (another great workforce story for another day). I dealt with two airlines: United and Lufthansa. Amazingly, the United call center was in some distant country, while the Lufthansa person I connected with was an American based in the U.S. Although the United representative was courteous, hardworking and ultimately helpful, the customer experience could hardly match what I received from Lufthansa, where I could ask more detailed questions and get a superior customer service experience.

There’s a simple reason for all of this: Call center work is, unfortunately, viewed as a high-volume, low-skill activity that can be cheaply outsourced to some foreign workforce. In my view, this is a shortsighted management approach. It seems to ignore the fact that customers are likely to remember the personal interaction they had with your workforce and how well they were served as much as the product your company sold them. I remember the personalized service I received from Lufthansa, and it makes me want to use them again in the future. I remember United, an airline I fly with a lot, only because I was happy that the call center didn’t completely screw me up.

All too often, businesses that outsource their call centers forget what their customers expect. That’s why it is wonderful to read stories like this one today’s New York Times. It’s about Netflix and how the online movie rental service made a strategic decision to place its call center in Portland, Oregon, “shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers.”

In business, as in many of life’s endeavors, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and just mimic what everyone else is doing. I tip my hat to the courageous managers and executives at Netflix who didn’t allow themselves to be stampeded into the outsourcing craze, and instead are offering something precious—something that customers just can’t get enough of these days: caring, personal service from someone who really knows what they’re going through.