Customer Call: You have the Power!

The title of this post may bring back memories to Howard Dean's failed presidential bid, but I'm not talking about Howard this time. I had a 25-minute conversation with a customer today that would not end. It was actually a monologue and I sat on the phone and listened and listened and listened... He wasn't asking a question, only giving his opinion on Intel business practices.

"Why aren't you selling this type of processor in Japan?" and "You have to take care of the little guy and not the Dell-types" and "You need to have more supply when the demand for product is big" and "I have no friends and you are the only person that will listen to me."

You must understand, Mr. Customer: I work for $9.87 an hour talking to stupid people all day who want to know more about Intel products, dumb Asians that don't listen to what I say and yell at me, or nerds that think they know more than me but they do not. You may think you are calling Intel, but you are actually calling Convergys, a customer support company that is responsible for helping customers for many Fortune-500 companies. I am employed by Convergys. Convergys directly deposits money into my bank account. Intel provides the Pentium III 733 mHz (!) computers that I work on. (If you don't get that joke, you don't know anything about computers and the year 2005.)

So when you are talking about supply chains or lecturing me on Intel business practices, you must realize that I honestly and truly do not care.

I actually told the guy that he was wasting his breath because I could not do anything about it and recommended that he send an email to an email address I provided him.

Then he said, "You are undercutting yourself. You do have power! Big changes only come from within! If I wrote an email, Intel would think I was a dumb customer. If you start the ball rolling, things will change."

Not only did I get paid $4.11 for that conversation, I got some unsolicited motivational advice for free.

Yay.