by Patrick Appel
A reader counters an earlier one:
Your reader writes:
"Hang up on a telemarketer without so much as a "not interested" and the thick-skinned telemarketer will not think, "Oh, gee, I guess they don’t want it." They'll know that. They'll just keep calling you back to punish you."
Having worked in 2 call centers in my life one inbound (tech support) and one outbound (unashamed telemarketing), I can assure you that the person that is on the other end of the line has NO control over who his/her phone will call. The phone systems are automated and have been for a very long time, the "thick-skinned telemarketer" is a likely a high school kid with a headset, a computer terminal, and if s/he is lucky, a good chess game with the person in the next cube. These are not demons seeking vengeance, just kids seeking paychecks.
The notion that a telemarketer would "keep calling you back to punish you" is wildly uninformed. I had to make a certain number of sales per hour to receive my full wage. If a call is not going to end in a sale the telemarketer knows it and wants to get off the line ASAP so that they can move on to the next person. Much of the advice about handling telemarketers (including the pranks) rings hollow to me. The folks I worked with wanted sales and smoke breaks and nothing more, try to play a game and the marketer will say goodbye to get another call on.
I would also like to point out that the notion that sales are rare, is false. I sold a whole great heaping ton of unemployment/disability insurance for credit cards (not a good deal) to real, normal people who thought it sounded like a good idea. The faster I talked the more I sold, I don't know why but the best sellers were the ones who could enunciate at high speed. Strangely the hardest thing to move was free 3 month memberships to the local gym. You offer a good deal, no-strings and even the suckers get skeptical.
Another reader provides further insight into the industry:
I am the telemarketing manager for a well-respected regional theater. Having followed this conversation with some interest I have to agree with the commenters on the worst practices of the industry at large. And I certainly have no patience with bad telemarketers or scammy operations, they only make my job harder. A few tips on dealing with telemarketers:
• Register with the national do-not-call list if you do not wish to receive commercial telemarketing calls, but be aware that non-profits are exempt from the list, as are businesses with which you’ve had commercial dealings within a one year period
• That being said, we are required to keep an in-house list of patrons who do not wish to be called. If you wish to be placed on this list, any legitimate operation will be happy to do so: we still consider you a potential customer for our larger organization and have no desire to purposely piss you off. Please note though: simply hanging up will not put you on an in-house Do Not Call list (and by the way, I know of no professional who would call back a “hang-up” out of spite, there is no profit in it).
• Use caller ID or otherwise monitor your calls. Every time I receive a new email pop-up I don’t stop what I am doing to answer it. I give it a quick glance to see if it is something that needs my immediate attention or not. Do the same thing with your phone: If you are too busy to answer, don’t.
• Be up-front. I you are not at all interested in what we are selling just say so. Trust me we can take it. If you are just too busy to talk at that moment, please let us know that, we would be more than happy to arrange a better time to talk.
• Finally, when dealing with legitimate non-profits, for the most part, the people who call you are honest, hard-working folk, who actually believe in the cause they are trying to support. In fact for many non-profits telemarketing accounts for a substantial proportion of their incomes. This is especially true for groups that are too small to afford television advertising and must rely on the tried and true (though never popular) telemarketing call.
The Dish 