(no subject)

[theweaselking]

All telemarketing is spam.

Phone-spam is no different from email-spam, which is to say that those who practice it are dishonest, unbearably rude, and serve no useful purpose whatsoever. I make a point of refusing to do business with any company that makes unsolicited contact with me, and I have in the past cancelled service with companies I'd done previous business with when they abused our relationship by contacting me attempting to sell things unrelated to our current business.

All telemarketers must die.

Comments

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

i haven't gotten such a call in years, though.
and i have the good sense to request removal from a call list before terminating a useful relationship.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Do you deal with Rogers? They never got the message. Hell, they'd frequently call me to offer products I already had or wasn't eligible for. I no longer do business with them.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

whos that? basically if someone doesn't get the message i get more and more aggressive until they do. so far success. like if i need to fax every punk ass mother fucker in the entire place of business i will do that. i did it once. no, twice.

[pope-guilty.livejournal.com]

SOMEBODY just got called.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

oh snap, yo

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

We have national reservation register here, so the only spam calls are from the phone company. Obviously, as The Phone Company, they have the right - or perhaps duty - to call customers and inform them on how to save money by spending more.

Unless I am teaming in City of Heroes, I try to make time for them. Plenty of time. I listen sympathetically, ask detailed questions, tell them I've heard good things about their competitors, and overall sound very uncertain. Then, after they have done their best, I refuse, as I intended from the very start.

[harald387.livejournal.com]

See, that just hurts the poor schlub who's tasked with making the call, while doing absolutely nothing to hurt the company that hired him to do it. I know I only ever considered (and never actually picked up) telemarketing as an absolute last resort in jobs; I don't imagine anyone working one of those call centres is anything anyone would do if they had any other choice.

Refuse quickly and politely, ask them to take you off their list - even The Phone Company has to - and at least let the poor guy on the other end get off the phone. The job's demeaning enough without having people fuck with you.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Don't ask them to take you off their list, as they can call you again whenever they get a new list of numbers with your listing on it. Have them put you on their 'do not call' list instead.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

I respectfully disagree. I work for an unpopular employer myself and worked with customers for years. People playing dumb is rather a break from the curses, threats and emotional drama one has to expect in the job. And it definitely hits the employer, since nobody in Norway is employed on a "no cure no pay" basis. And in any case, "just doing my job" doesn't cut it with me. This is Norway, if you are unable to get a non-evil job you can survive fine on welfare. Only half of the population is employed, after all, despite the generous wages and hand-wringing over lack of workforce.

[kookiemaster.livejournal.com]

strangely, aside from that security company that doesn't seem to understand that I don't own a house and therefore don't need a home security system, the worse offender had to be pathetico ... which is why I switched to Rogers. So far no phone spam.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

You folks up north should get a national Do Not Call list. Haven't had much phone spam in years, and the spam I've gotten I've reported to the List officials. Boy, oh, boy, when you tell a spammer that he or she can be fined for violating the list, they get cranky. It's a beautiful thing.

Now we have to get the currently exempted political and charity orgs on the list.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Oh, please. Spammers are, by definition, dishonest scammers, meaning a "Do Not Call" list is just a publicly available list of numbers that you've confirmed to be live, which you're certain that someone will actually answer on the far end.

And since spam-advocates lobby your government so effectively that spamming is now perfectly legal in the backwards third-world banana republic that you claim as a bastion of civilisation, not only is your DNC list full of idiotic exceptions, but the penalties are also completely toothless.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

. . . a "Do Not Call" list is just a publicly available list of numbers that you've confirmed to be live, which you're certain that someone will actually answer on the far end.

Ah, but were that true, we would be getting calls left and right, just like everyone I know who hasn't bothered to register. They get calls every 15 minutes some days. I don't. Once we joined the list, the calls all but dried up overnight.

(The one exception was a small window installer in a neighboring town. After the third call, I informed her that, indeed, small businesses counted as banned spammers. She got pissy, but didn't call back.)

The penalties may be toothless, but you can do a lot of damage gumming someone if you do it enough.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I used to sell insurance. The people I was calling filled in a card and mailed it to the company I worked for asking for somebody to call them. The problem was that we were severely understaffed, so some of the people I was calling sent the card in YEARS ago, so for all practical purposes they were cold calls. It's a hard, hard industry.

Like everything else in sales, there are two types of salesmen:

When I started out, I intended to help people. The folks I sat down with had really terribly group plans through work, with tons of holes in them. My job was to find those holes and fill them. I remember sitting down with a couple who were both injured in a car accident and missed almost a year of work. If I had gotten to them two years sooner, they would have been able to keep their house.

That's one type of sales person. They're the ones you want, because they will actually help you rather than just pushing stuff on you.

After a few very successful months, I started to slip a bit. My boss took me aside and basically told me that I was doing a great job of helping people, but that in order to pay my bills so I could keep helping people, I needed to start selling to people who didn't need my help. He suggested I treat it like a game, to sharpen my skills so that it didn't matter if they wanted to buy or not. I left the company a month later.

Those are the ones to avoid. The world is a potential paycheque to them.

So I guess my point is that not all sales people, telemarketer or not, is a scumbag. Some are opportunistic bastards, a lot are just people trying to get by at a crappy job, and an exceptional few genuinely believe they're going to help you. Whether they're right or not is always up for debate, but at least they're genuine in their intent.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

*Snerk*

Yeah, that's about right.

The funny thing is that while I was there I sat down with about ten of my peers twice a week every week and learned how to handle people on the phone. We even did drills roleplaying calls with one another. That was just how things were done, and we all got very very good at it. Most telemarketers don't get any kind of ongoing training, and it really shows.

So for a while I used to listen to a telemarketer's spiel and then critique their presentation in great detail. It's kind of fun in a weird way. Most of the people I did this with were really grateful, but there was one guy who was actually quite good who tried to use my critique to build rapport and get me to buy again at the end. He failed, but it was a lot of fun playing the game.

Damn, I actually miss dropping my land line so I can't play with telemarketers anymore.

[caerlas.livejournal.com]

I work in customer service at Chase. People call us all the tie to opt out of solicitations. But the BIG one is to opt out of INFORMATION SHARING so that "trusted 3rd party companies" aren't sold your information.

Frankly though, since I got on the national DNC registry in the US, I haven't had a telemarketer in quite a while.

[frith]

I've worked as a telemarketer and I hated it. I also got fired pretty quickly. I don't remember if I ever made a sale. Thing is, I see telemarketing as pretty much the same way the the Weasel King sees it -- analog spam (old school!). I also see it in ecological terms (in a biological sense, not the moronic "green" bastardization of the term). Telemarketing is foraging strategy that works when benefits (new Marks) outweighs costs (time spent searching for Marks). To do my part to help increase costs and hopefully starve telemarketing to extinction, I keep telemarketers on the line for as long as possible before I finally admit that there is no chance in Hell that I'm going to buy anything over the phone. When robotic telemarketers call I just leave the phone off the hook for an hour or so. Since I have yet to hear an "off the hook" tone I suppose that I'm successful in tying up at least one of the robot's phone lines, neutering it.

[thormation.livejournal.com]

Telemarketers are why I have Caller ID and voicemail. I still get calls, but I haven't actually talked to a telemarketer in about 10 years.

Also it's handy for sifting out the people whom I don't feel like talking to right that second from the ones that I do.