this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Cold calling telemarketing ("Do you have time to answer some questions about x?"). Felt grotty with every call (got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don't want to call you any more than you want to receive the call), lasted 2-weeks.
Swapped out to data entry of paper responses into a spreadsheet, was so much better but only lasted 2 days before I went back to the phones. Am verg grateful I don't have to do that any more.
What's the correct way of handling those calls. I'll usually just let them say their bit and then say I'm not interested, which I think is fair but I wonder if it's not easier for everyone involved to just cut them up and say you're not interested immediately.
My partner's mum gets right on my goat because she insists on being an absolute arse on the phone. I get it, it's annoying but I don't understand the need to be a total see you next Tuesday to the person on the phone. Hang up and move on.
I mean, I was good with people hanging up during the spiel. Saying "sorry I'm not interested" is more than fine and likely to put you on the upper end of calls that's day. Swearing or getting upset isn't acceptable and fails to recognise that neither of you want to be on that call.
However telemarketing has a better response rate than paper based surveys, and the data is used to drive decision making. A lot of people complain when things don't work out for you - like local council decisions on new amenities, but if you don't submit your opinion you can't be heard. It's not perfect but it is used to define a surprising number of things.
Wrt to you MIL, yeah, it's not nice to be on the recieving end of hostility, I get it can be annoying but as I implied above nobody chooses the job, I personally had to take whatever I could get and I was too young/not out of work long enough for JSA (plus JSA is a pain to get anyway, but that's a whole different story).
I usually ask them who they're calling to speak to, since if they're not a cold-caller they would know my name. This usually makes them hang up. With your inside experience, is this a good way of handling it?
This is an excellent way of screening. The company I worked for was an opt-in service. So all people being called had at some point agreed to it (though most forget ticking the box on a form or whatever, which is totally understandable), and we therefore had their names, so it wouldn't have worked for what we were doing. But yes if a cold-caller doesn't know who they're calling then it's a good indication you don't need what they're offering.
I heard a podcast with Scott Hanselman (a technologist in the US) and he had a phone system where you had to say the name of the person you wanted to an automated gate-keeper, which sounded like a really cool system, and similar to the sort of screening you're doing.
"Please take my number off your list." and hang up. Any company that follows the OFCOM rules is obliged to honour verbal requests for removal, so that's the correct thing to do.
Admittedly, a cold calling company that follows the rules is an oxymoron so I tend to just cut them off with a "for fuck sake", hang up, Google the number out of sheer curiosity, and then add it to the block list. Every now and then I see a number in the call history that's been auto-blocked, so that at least provides a little satisfaction.
Or there's the Google call screening thing, though legitimate callers find it confusing and often hang up before you get chance to take over the call, or assume it's voicemail and try to leave a message.
In respect to 1) you're absolutely correct, that should be two sentences and not the horrible run-on that I created.
In response to 2), yes I can understand being wary of spam callers, there weren't nearly as many 15 years ago when I was doing the job. It was targeted research, so people who'd opted in to being contacted for marketing purposes ("how is your new toaster working out for you") or local authority requests for comment ("are you happy with the new park that opened").
I've had some real howlers the other way though (with actual scammers) so I understand the frustration, one woman who was obviously a spam PPE caller yelled at me "don't you like money!" after I had politely declined,and there's no dealing with that. In the end the easiest thing to do and a definite improvement on being nasty, is just hang up, in my opinion.
Lord, I remember back when the worst thing calling was either a telemarketer, or a collection agency.
Some of them were unpleasant, but not nearly as unpleasant as the people who are trying to straight up steal your shit these days.
Barring a known number, that phone can keep on ringing.
I have a contact in my phone called Spam (with a picture of Spam), and I add any number that doesn't pass the sniff test within 30s (particularly Robo-spammers, urgh!), it can very helpful to get a repeat call and the picture of a can of spam tells me not to bother picking up.
If I can, I keep them on the phone until they hung up on me frustrated. More often than not I can, I used to wfh and be able, in between meetings, to keep them going for a while, while doing my actual work. "Can you spell that url again? No it says page not found" or "of course I want a refund for that iPhone, what do I need to do". All while typing my work emails, chatting with colleagues or working on a slide deck. Nowadays I'm looking after young babies full time. So even easier to apologise for the background noise and ask them to repeat their whole spiel for a fourth time.
That's fair. It seems there's a good scene in recording Scam Baiting antics and putting it on You Tube too.
Hyphen or semicolon or full-stop here, not comma.
If your sign for a job that you know irritates every single person that comes into contact with, then that is on you.
If every person had the respect for others to refused those jobs, then those calls wouldn't exist.
I think you may misunderstand what I did. It was reaching out to people who had opted in to be part of market research. If they said "don't contact me again" or if they were hostile then they got on the "no-call" list and were never contacted again. The only way that we could have got their phone number is if they submitted it during some sort of sign-up process somewhere. So I think you might be equating the work I did with something else.
The "cold" part of the "cold-calling" I mentioned above was because they weren't explicitly expecting the call, but they had somewhere signed up and agreed to be contacted.
Refusing to take work is a rather privileged position, not everyone has that luxury, and I didn't at the time. That being said I was out of there as quick as I could find something else (I only did 2 weeks).
Yeah but you're the one getting paid for it and they're not! Sorry, but you shouldn't have worked there. Don't blame the people you're intentionally irritating for getting mad at you for your own poor choice.
Disclaimer that I never yell at these people but I will often hang up on them after the first "sorry not interest" gets ignored. If other people want to yell at them to get the message that they don't want to be bothered, more power to them. Fuck telemarketers.
"sorry, I'm not interested" and hanging up is fine, cursing my family and telling me what a PoS I am, not so much. I think it's clear you've never had to work in the service industry if you think that working a job like this dehumanizes you and justifies rudeness of this scale.
Calling you names and insulting family is not the same as simple yelling. Now you're changing your narrative to straw man me into defending behavior like that.
You deserved to get yelled at if you are calling people to waste their time to market a product to them. It should be illegal, but at best it's unethical, and you contributed to the problem.
That said, nobody deserves to be called names, slurs, or death threats, or whatever other new things you decide to include in your narrative.
You ended your post with "fuck telemarketers", on a post where I was highlighting that I hated having to do that job, so yeah, you demonstrate a distinct lack of empathy, if there's a wider context on that comment please let me know, as I'm not trying to strawman you, when you explicitly stated I deserved to be treated like that.
The fact you think telemarketing is about selling a product and not market research (about all sorts of things including political opinions, or NGOs etc) shows that you don't know what you're talking about and seem like an angry person. I'm going to disengage now, but I hope you can find peace :)
Telemarketing could be selling items or could mean market research.
Since you're now bringing up the market research aspect (which most people don't associate with telemarketing), ok, let's tackle that new narrative:
Good market research practices involve paying people for their time and energy spent providing feedback about a product or behavior. Telemarketers do no such thing. They just bother people to solicit from them. You are suggesting that just cuz it's for research that makes it better?
Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about - It doesn't matter what it's for - calling people with solicitations of any kind is wrong.
Nah. Here's the rules:
My record is 75 minutes with a 'Bell Atlantic' rep who was fluid with details and gave me an edge to contrast the data-points, and who finally hung up claiming she wanted to validate my information, Mr Thomas, to which I replied "Thomas, who the hell is that?" before the line went dead. I loved rocking out phrases like "well are you lying now or were you lying then?" I sometimes hope she took a different job the next day and hope she's seen success. My name isn't Thomas.