What to say to a telemarketer

[kickstart 1]

Yeah but that was pink ones !

[Zak33]

a VERY good thread, and I thank Uncle for editing his thread. 100% respect to him for doing so. I look forward to him staying about here, because IF the debates are held intelligently, which frankly he is clearly very capable of, HEXUS will be better off for having him.

Love reigns....supreme

'Cept I still hate cold callers......

[Tumble]

I'm polite in the first instance, "no thankyou, this is a business number, I'm in the Isle of Man - your product isn't applicable here, I'm already insured, Please Go away" etc.. but hte last one I got... rang me 3 times in 5 minutes. I went through the polite spiel the first time - still tried to sell me whatever so I put the phone down (I was in the middle of a fiddly reconstruction at that point). The SAME PERSON rang me back 30 seconds later "We seem to have been cut off.." "Yes, I know. I put the phone down - I'm already covered thankyou." hang up. then she rings AGAIN, and this time I lose my rag a bit and explain that I don't like cold callers - and she tells me "Well... this isn't cold calling anyway" and puts the phone down on me. Good riddance.

[ponolops]

But it's me on the phone son!

Every time I call to see how you are, you tell me to boil my head because you are already double glazed, or you don't want a free trip to the Outer Hebrides and No! you definitely do not want life insurance!

I'M YOUR MOTHER!!!!!! BE NICE!








Damn! Now who am I going to sell these encyclopaedia to?

[Uncle Psychosis]

Secondly, I'm doing my tiny bit to change the economics of telemarketing. It might not work, but it can't hurt - except for telemarketer's profits. Therefore, it is neither petty nor, in my view, a waste of my time. And there is only one person who's opinion about whether I'm wasting my time or not matters, and that's mine.

I feel this thread has pretty much run its course, and I apologise if I have got the wrong end of the stick about a few things

However, I still maintain that its entirely pointless you abusing/making uncomfortable/wasting the time of telemarketers. Think about it for a second:

1. You have a cruel, cold hearted telemarketer who doesnt give a toss whether hes made some granny climb a flight of stairs to answer their call. Is being mean to them going to make them stop? No.

2. You have a poor single mother who has no alternative to working in a call centre and has to do what shes told or she loses her job. Is being mean to her going to make a difference? No.

Sure, you wasting some of their time may make you feel better about it, but in the end its just lowering yourself and wasting your own time. Plus, by being unpleasant to someone with your name and phone number you leave yourself open to some pretty vindictive possibilities for revenge!

Cheers

Sam

[Tarffie]

You've been beaten to that

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.php?t=51341

Yeah but that was pink ones !

You can make another one about pink handbags on 05/08/07

PHD '07.

[Saracen]

I feel this thread has pretty much run its course, ....

Maybe so. But in any event, it's been worth saying, whether we agree with each other or not.

.... and I apologise if I have got the wrong end of the stick about a few things

No probs. It happens all the time in discussions. All's well that ends well.

However, I still maintain that its entirely pointless you abusing/making uncomfortable/wasting the time of telemarketers. Think about it for a second:

1. You have a cruel, cold hearted telemarketer who doesnt give a toss whether hes made some granny climb a flight of stairs to answer their call. Is being mean to them going to make them stop? No.

2. You have a poor single mother who has no alternative to working in a call centre and has to do what shes told or she loses her job. Is being mean to her going to make a difference? No.

Sure, you wasting some of their time may make you feel better about it, but in the end its just lowering yourself and wasting your own time. Plus, by being unpleasant to someone with your name and phone number you leave yourself open to some pretty vindictive possibilities for revenge!

Point 1) - Agreed, if all telemarketeers were cruel and cold-hearted. But there's a reason why a lot of people don't last very long - it's not a nice job to do, in large part because of the reaction of the people called. I'd suggest that reactions would be a lot less, erm, vivid if people that had asked not to be called weren't called.

Point 2) - Agreed. But it STILL isn't an excuse for ignoring the law and intruding into other people's lives. However much of a bleeding heart case you make for the poor, underfed waif making the call, she doesn't know whether the person she's calling has it even worse, or how inconvenient and upsetting the call may be.

As I said, my time is only wasted if I consider it to be wasted, and I don't, so it isn't. As I said before, I don't do it all the time. I do it IF I have the time and if the inclination takes me. If I were the only one doing it, it would be utterly futile in terms of the chance of having any effect on telemarketing profits or business strategy. But you will notice that even from the comments in this thread, I'm not the only one that thinks that way .... though clearly some people don't. If everybody did it, or even if enough people did it, it would waste a lot of telemarketers time, and their calling stats would plummet. If individuals were singled out, then it may cost them their jobs, but if it was a universal practice, it would affect all telemarketing staff across the board. Companies can't fire everyone. So, one of two things happens :-

1) They go out of business. Now, while that is fine with me, it isn't going to happen.
2) Business strategy gets changed.

Marketing, whether cold calling or any other type, is a numbers game. Take maildrops .... if you assume that for every leaflet you stick through a letterbox, 9 out of 10 end up in the bin, then 1 in 10 (10%) doesn't. Of that 1 in 10, 90% of people that read it aren't interested in the product or service, then that implies 10% are interested. And of that number, if 10% actually buy, then you can see that you have to stuff 1000 letters or leaflets to get one sale. The profitability of the whole process therefore depends on the profit from 1 sale covering, amongst other costs, the marketing effort to 1000 people.

The self-same logic applies to cold-calling, but there, the critical cost is the time of the telemarketeer. For the economics to work, a certain number of calls have to be made, because if they aren't, that 10% of 10% of 10% principle makes it uneconomic. So look at the logistics of it :-

1) Standard method. Make the call, told "Sorry, not interested. Bye". Elapsed time? 30 seconds.

2) My method. Make the call, get strung out for 10 minutes.

If everybody used my method, and if that timing applied, cold calling would be only 5% as efficient as it currently is. Or to put that another way, the cost per customer of cold-calling increased 20-fold, or 2000%.

And my record for stringing someone out and keeping them dangling is 45 minutes. Granted, that's the exception. But if typical, it would mean 11 calls per person per day, rather than 960 (30 seconds/call, 8 hour shift). I have no doubt that the 10-percent-cube principle would make telemarketing hopelessly unproductive if that were the case.

So, as I said, business strategy would have to change.

Not everybody objects to telemarketing calls. Some people (though I struggle to understand it personally) say they like them. So fine, let telemarketing operations call them. At the moment, my opinion is that MOST telemarketing companies respect the TPS and don't call people that are registered. But some don't. If people that are registered were to always make the call so much more expensive for the telemarketing company, then even those that respect neither people's wishes nor the law of the land would change their practices, because I'll guarantee they have a healthy respect for their own profitability.

I would have thought that the odds of successfully telemarketing to someone that has signed up for TPS are pretty small. Maybe I overestimate people's intelligence, but I would have thought it was a waste of marketing effort. So, for those companies that still do it, I can only assume that it's cheaper for them to write off the time they waste doing it than to respect people's wishes and the law and take steps to avoid doing it.


An argument could even be made that I'm doing telemarketing staff a favour. No really, bear with me.

Point 1) of mine, above, was that staff turnover is high because it's not a nice job to do, and a large factor in that is adverse reactions from call recipients. Soooooo .... if a large-scale time-wasting campaign forced the recalcitrant element of the industry to mend their ways, for economic reasons, and actually start respecting the wishes of those that don't want calls, then staff would be much less likely to suffer that adverse reaction (whatever form it takes), and their working life would improve, at least in that respect. Maybe that poor single working mother that you're concerned about, would find her job much less unpleasant, stay in the job longer and have less trouble striving to feed her kids. So really, my stance is active philanthropy, not a "waste of time" or "pointless".

Oh alright, I'm pulling your wotsit just a bit with that last remark, but the economics argument is still a valid one, and so is the point that my time is my time to spend how I feel, and is not a waste if I feel it was worthwhile.

[Oobie-]

I remember when I got called by some sort of ....... hmmmm I don't actually remember what they were for now.. and they were asking all these detailed multiple choice questions, some were personal, like:
Do I have a g/f - spouse etc
What do your parents do, etc.

She was a pleasant woman and it must have been at least 30 questions which took at least 10 mins.
I have no idea why I didnt do something random like this.
Im thinking, play along with them, and then cut them off mid-sentence with "HOLY £(*$ MY FOOD CAUGHT FIRE, oh crap my kitchen" put the phone on the side, make noise and come back 10 mins later with "great, now what do my pet crocodiles eat" and hang up

oh I remember one of them was "If you were buying a new electrical component, what would you be most concerned about: the price, the quality, the brand or none of the above"

Very strange questions.

[autopilot]

Just sound like standard market research questions.

[mightymouse]

who?? i was dead a long time ago

[chrimbow]

this was quite good until page 2ish

I had several cold calls repetively from 3g phones a few weeks ago. Despite telling them to stop calling they kept it up. Fighting back, I pretended to be a copper investigating the murder of the occupant of the house. I asked how he knew the deceased and why he had called so many times over the last few weeks. I told him we had traced the call and an officer would be investigating. The guy was trying to hang up but I wouldnt let him go. I pointed out that the deceased was a prolific active homosexual rent boy and asked if if he was a client. By now he was nearly crying. I kept it up for 20 minutes before the line went dead!

[Clunk]

this was quite good until page 2ish

I had several cold calls repetively from 3g phones a few weeks ago. Despite telling them to stop calling they kept it up. Fighting back, I pretended to be a copper investigating the murder of the occupant of the house. I asked how he knew the deceased and why he had called so many times over the last few weeks. I told him we had traced the call and an officer would be investigating. The guy was trying to hang up but I wouldnt let him go. I pointed out that the deceased was a prolific active homosexual rent boy and asked if if he was a client. By now he was nearly crying. I kept it up for 20 minutes before the line went dead!

I saw that on telly as well, was quite funny

[chrimbow]

i heard it on an mp3 clip someone sent to me a while back so I tried it out... My mrs was pishing herself laughing when I was doing it, especially when i wouldnt let HIM go lol