I had read here some time ago that as a telemarketer, you are unable to hang up the phone. This is done so the salesperson cannot just hang the phone up to get call volume up and it was never a problem since the people being called inevitably hang up.
Is there truth to this?
Depends on the company. I telemarketed for a small home improvement company and the owners had no problems with us hanging up. In fact, they encouraged us to do so in order to get on to the next potential customer.
IME, there is typically no technological block to disconnecting a call. There are rules and standards regarding when to disconnect, which are enforced via call monitoring. (After x minutes of silence, for example.) Also, a rep with too many ‘short calls’ will face some serious scrutiny. (I used to produce a weekly ‘short call’ report for the telesales department of a call center; believe me, it’s pretty obvious when someone’s cutting out fast trying to inflate his outbound contact numbers.)
I worked for an eeeeeeeeeeevil company called Comp-U-Card… hanging up was possible. Short calls were not a great concern because they monitored the percentage of calls that made a sale. So hanging up before you even start your spiel would have been a most unhealthy habit.
Working there was also a most unhealthy habit. But that’s another story.
All the telemarketers who call me are able to hang up. I know because as a rule, I never hang up on one. Rather, I wait for them to get fed up and hang up on me. So I suppose if a telemarketer who could not hang up ever called me, we would be talking for a long time…
I worked as a telemarketer twice, first generating leads for insurance salesmen and then selling magazines. At both places I could hang up on people. Of course if you just hung up on folks all day long and never made any money for the company you could find yourself in trouble. We were encouraged to persuade people who didn’t want our products/services to give our offers more consideration, but nobody expected us to get into hour-long arguments. Generally, I’d just hang up on people who didn’t want to see an agent from our company or who didn’t want to subscribe to magazines over the phone. People who were jerks to me when I worked at the insurance place usually got stuck on my callback list and they’d get calls from most of my hundred or so co-workers. I was never forbidden from hanging up on a person dead set against doing business with me, though.
I worked in a small time call center. Basically, we just had a bank of 10 phones. No monitoring or recording equipment. We were expected to generate leads for insurance companies - mostly homeowner’s insurance.
The owner of the company was a real sleezeball, who eventually closed the business with 7 hours notice and skipped the state. He didn’t care what his employees did, as long as they got 7-10 nibbles an hour.
We were allowed to terminate a call, as long as we were reasonably polite to the person with whom we were speaking. I did so often, so as to get out of an unprofitable call, and into the next one.
Not much to add, except that as a former call center supervisor (it was an inbound call center - customers called us to order or ask questions), we definitely had a rule against hanging up on customers. However, if a customer was abusive, the rep was allowed to hang up, and then let a supervisor know what happened.
Certainly this would depend on their equipment. At my telemarketing job, they had a computerized dialer in the back room, and every agent had a workstation connected to it by LAN. When someone “disposed” a call by marking it as “sold”, “business”, “redial”, “turned down”, or “do not call”, the dialer hung up the line, and transferred the agent to another call after a couple minutes.
We were expected to get out of the call after the customer declined 3 offers, but most calls ended sooner than that.
The telemarketing company I worked for only allowed us to hang up if the customer became profane or abusive. (They recorded all of our calls, so you could get caught if you just just plain gave up and disconnected a call.) We had a list of responses we were supposed to give to statements like: “I’m not interested,” with dozens of variations, so we had to keep talking until the customer hung up on us. It was very tedious, but on the bright side, I got so used to saying the same thing over and over that I could actually do crossword puzzles while talking. Nevertheless, I got tired of it quickly. The “deal” I was expounding was actually a rip-off (they were VERY careful to instruct us on what we could and could not say) if you did the math. I felt guilty, as well I should. Needless to say, I only worked there about a week or two.