Maybe things are different when you’re upside down.
I get very, very few calls from sources as you suggest – ones who I have a “business relationship” with. And in those rare occasions, when it’s from a source that I really do business with, I just might respond, because I feel we have a common need. It’s the cold calls I can’t abide, who want something for nothing and haven’t the slightest idea who I am, nor do they care; they just want bodies.
So having an unlisted number really does make a difference, just not to you.
Aside from the business relationship scam, the harassers also get around national do-not-call lists by locating extra-nationally. Each harasser and each company that the harasser works for is supposed to be licenced in the province or state in which the calls are received, but enforcement of do-not-call lists and enforcement of telemarketer licensing fails across national borders.
Notably, the USA national do-not-call list no longer accepts non-USA numbers, so it’s open season on Canadians for American call centres who ignore Canada’s national do-not-call list.
It meant that the number would be put back in the pile to be called again in a few months’ time. From the company’s point of view, the population was divided into two groups: those who, due to physical impossibilities, could not have solar heating fitted; and those who wanted solar heating. If we didn’t get a reason to put somebody into the first group, we had to assume that they were part of the second but we’d got them at a bad time and so they weren’t prepared to discuss it. We used an auto-dialler, so we didn’t have any data on people beyond that they lived in the right area and hadn’t subscribed to the Do Not Call list.
Oh, and your way of dealing with us? We’d still mark you as a Prospect, but we would harbour no ill feelings towards you (not that anybody should care what a telemarketer thinks of them, especially Dave Hartwick, who’s giving the rest of us a worse name than we already have).
No, I think I have reading comprehension just fine. What telemarketers and surveyors don’t have is listening comprehension. Seriously, when I say “Do not call me ever again,” whether profanity is used or not, I really mean “Do not call me ever again.”
If I have not used the correct magic words, excuse me. But I think I have made myself clear with the above, and I expect that telemarketers and surveyors will honour my wishes.
Just saw this in the Yahoo! news. It occurs to me that the telemarketers/tele-surveyors/tele-jackasses are basically forcing us to the inevitable end of having our phones only accepting calls from numbers we specifically program into the phones. No doubt the bastards will figure a way around that, too.
I’d be content with that: basically a whitelist for incoming numbers, with everything else sent to the equivalent of a spam folder for review. It’s perfectly possible with the technology we already have, but it’ll probably take legislation—or at least the threat of it—to compel the phone companies to allow it without charging a monthly fee.
No doubt, the “industry” (as they no doubt like to refer to themselves) will finagle exceptions. Or worse yet, they’ll harass the phone companies so much that the whitelist function will be the most difficult thing to activate you’ve ever encountered and will constantly revert to the default of being open to every caller in the universe.
I’ve thought about that a few times and it seems to me that all it takes is somebody to make a suitable gizmo; the phone companies would not be able to do a thing about it (other than maybe getting the feds to declare such devices illegal - wouldn’t put it past them on either side of the border).
Just needs a gizmo connected between your phone and the phone line that picks up call display info, compares it to a list, and if the number isn’t on the list it either blocks the call outright or activates an answering machine immediately. I’m surprised no one is marketing such a thing (or have they?)
I think that if the purpose of your survey is to improve products and services that there is no upside at all in continuing to call someone once they tell you they are not interested in speaking with you. There are enough people out there that don’t mind taking the surveys and you can get a wealth of information from them…and if they have an interest in the improvement of whatever product or services you are offering I’m sure they will be helpful.
Of course, all too often these surveys are sales pitches in disguise, “How would you feel about internet service of ONLY $19.95 a month”.
Now there are surveys where I understand the need for persistance ( even though I don’t agree with it )…any survey that involves personal opinions on things such as politics and sex will be biased if you only talk to people that are enthusiastic about speaking with you…but that doesn’t mean it’s not a nuisance,
I have a phone number that has been assigned to me for years, it used to be my business number. I get over 20 unsolicted calls a day on this number, which is why I no longer use it as a business number…it takes a considerable amount of time to deal with that volume of unwanted calls when you are trying to work and maintain concentration. I do still give out that number whenever I have to give one to buy something on-line…it keeps my “real” number clean, and about once a week a bite the bullet and go through the accumulated messages to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
Now, I am a lot nicer about the “official” survey calls I get…from government agencies, usually the Census Bureau or the CDC.
The company had the wrong point of view. Sometimes, people just don’t want a service, no matter how it’s pitched.
You can certainly hope that the telemarketers and surveyors will honor (with or without a u) your wishes…but don’t get your hopes up.
I’d love to take this one step further. Want to make a phone call? Deposit five bucks (or the local equivalent), or it will be charged to your phone number. If the person at the other end of the phone has you on the whitelist, your money is refunded. If the person at the other end of the phone taps in a code before the end of the phone call, the money is refunded. Otherwise, you have just given up five bucks. The phone company and the recipient can split this money evenly. Legitimate callers are not really inconvenienced much. On the other hand, people who like to dial prank call (with or without blocking the caller ID), drunks who decide that they really, really need a long conversation with someone they haven’t called in five years, cold calling telemarketers, and surveyors and charities who won’t listen to “Put me on your DNC list” will have to pay for the privilege of annoying people. A telemarketer who is selling something that people actually want, and that people actually want to receive calls about, wouldn’t have much of a problem. Same thing with surveyors. My time is worth money, and right now telemarketers and surveyors are not having to pay for it.
Here’s a new twist on this topic. While I was reading this thread, a call came in from 866 575-4108 and my caller ID said “toll-free call.” That’s usually a sign it is spoofed or a robo-dialer, and after 4 rings, my answering machine picked up.
I could hear the outgoing message and the incoming message at the same time, so the caller didn’t wait. Sure enough, it was a robo-call, but from Wal-Mart, saying that my prescription was ready to be picked up and it even gave the cost.
I guess that could be considered useful information to some, but I still find it annoying, and these thoughts occurred to me:
[ol][]If I hadn’t been listening, and played back the message later, I might not have heard all of it, because the recording missed the first part of the message. Can’t Wal-Mart afford more sophisticated robots? The spammers can![]I wasn’t expecting the message and wasn’t told that this is their SOP; indeed, I told them I would pick up the prescription in 2 days. Yet they called me anyway, so the info was useless.[]If the caller ID had said “Wal-Mart Pharmacy,” I might have picked up the phone. Since it showed all the earmarks of a telemarketer or poll-taker, I didn’t. Why can’t they help the consumer instead of masquerading as a junk call?[]I will be instructing Wal-Mart that they are not to call me except in an emergency, and if they really must, send an email. Emails don’t interrupt what I am doing to give me useless information.[/ol]
All my numbers are on our national do-not-call list. The fee charged to my clients when I answer the phone is fifty bucks plus tax. The phone just rang, so I answered. I interrupted the scripted speil with a polite and friendly: “Sue, please take me off your calling list and do not call me again.” She replied, “We are not telemarketing. We are conducting a survey.”
Although I realized that this person would not be paying me my fifty bucks, there was no reciprocity, for somehow she did not understand that I did not want her to call me.
I was wondering, just what is so darn hard to understand about “Sue, please take me off your calling list and do not call me again.” Were my words too complicated? Was my request just plain unreasonable? Or was it that this was just another non-achiever deliberately wasting my time and my money, who understood full well what I meant when I said “Sue, please take me off your calling list and do not call me again,” but who was unwilling to respect my request.
I figured that I could either be mature and just hang up, or I could spread a little joy by verbally abusing her. I expect the abuse was futile, for she probably gets verbally shat on quite a bit, given her habit of harassing people over the phone, but one can always hope than in some small way I might have brought a little ray of shit into her life. Reciprocity.
Believe me, I’m not defending that point of view - in my current telemarketing job, we take the view that if they don’t want the product/service, we’d be better off removing them from our database and speaking to somebody else. I floated that view in my solar heating job, and I was shut down.
And Muffin: The reason she explained that she was conducting a survey is because there are plenty of people who will not buy anything over the phone, but will happily conduct surveys, and it’s important to make sure that you’re not one of those people. Did you explain that you also don’t do surveys after she said that, or did you just launch into the insults?
When I tell a person to not call, believe it or not, I really mean it. It is not for the harasser to think, “Gee, perhaps he really wants me to call but does not realize it,so I’ll keep at it,” or “Golly, he does not understand why I am calling, so he can’t really mean it when he says ‘do not call’, so I’ll keep at it,” or “Gosh, he does not know what my survey is about, so I should tell him so that he can change his mind, so I’ll keep at it” or “Goodness, once he learns about my product he will be glad I called, so I’ll keep at it.”
There was only one appropriate response to “Sue, please take me off your calling list and do not call me again,” but Sue, being a typical telephone harasser, failed to make it.
It’s none of the caller’s damn business if Muffin, or even the damn Man in the the Moon, does or doesn’t also do surveys. The simple facts of the matter are:
[ol][li]The callee is the one paying for the telephonic equipment and time.[/li][li]The callee is the one inconvenienced.[/li][li]The callee (in this case, Muffin) told the free-loading caller that the callee is not interested and for said caller to cease and desist.[/li][li]The caller tried to get around a very clear request.[/ol][/li]
Seriously, it should not be so hard to grasp the simple words “DO NOT CALL THIS NUMBER!”
If so, I’m going to jump on the bandwagon of saying screw telemarketers. We only get one company try to call us at home, and although it’s only a few times a month (no, we haven’t been in a car accident that wasn’t our fault in the last three years, but good guess), if I had to pay money for the privilege I’d be pissed off.
For the most part, no, at least not by individual calls to landlines. But the recipient has purchased or leased the receiving equipment, not the caller, so I’d say the callee is bearing at least half the expense of the call.