Back when Jigsaw was first getting started, I handled all things customer facing. This included sales, data acquisition, business development and by far the most humbling, customer support. Luckily I had developed an outlet for my pent up frustration after turning the other cheek in the face of moronic customers for year as a sales person- I simply would write them an email response and send it to my friends and co-workers for fun. Here is one I sent last year:
From: LankyFranky
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007
To: info@jigsaw.com
Subject: Re: Jigsaw Administrative Action in Your Favor
Your data sucks. Perhaps you should spend some money fixing it instead of relying on a socialist approach which, history shows us, never works.
Dear LankyFranky,
Thank you for your constructive feedback and rarely seen socio-economic/governmental criticism of Jigsaw. I was actually a history major from Brown University; I would love to hear the historical analogies that each and every one of our 235,000 members could come up with about our business.
But since, sadly, I will live not enough lifetimes to process all these complaints, maybe I can make some guesses as to how our competitors would stack up using this form of criticism:
Dunn and Bradstreet: around since 1850, known to be jerks to small companies: English monarchy
InfoUsa: Got their start by copying phonebooks, ate up lots of smaller co’s, CEO accused of creating sub companies to employ his relatives: Feudalism
Harte Hankes: charges exorbitant rates for managing company data, no one knows anyone who works there: Dictatorship
ZoomInfo: Sends crawlers out on the Internet to aggregate profile data: Terminator Technoligopy
Maybe you could think of some more examples and put them on a T-shirt to sell at the medieval festivals that you no doubt attend monthly. In the meantime, we will take the money that we make from our “socialist” idea and invest it in more ideas that take advantage of the power of the network.
Sincerely,
Che Guevara
