Telemarketing: how do you react?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I immediately hang up on any recording. Found out lately that some of those recordings were from the people who finance our car, apparently the reason our checks to the payment center were taking 10 days or more to clear was that they moved the payment center and failed to notify us, and the Dallas location was forwarding our checks to Phoenix. They had been calling to get this straightened out, but they use the system where a recording says ‘Please hold for an important message’ and then plays hold music.

A note to companies doing this - calling me with a recording is NOT doing your best to contact me. If you don’t speak to me or my wife personally you have not called, as far as I am concerned, and I’m not going to begin waiting on hold for you after you wake my ass up (I sleep days). If you MUST use this inane method of calling your customers, at least make the recording say who the ‘important message’ is from, because I probably receive about 20 ‘important messages’ a day in my various email boxes and none of them are worth reading.

42

oooh that would frost my ass…

43

The worse sales call I ever got was a recording on my cell phone. I just hung up but I kept getting that call until I called my cell phone company to complain. It was a sales pitch from my own cell phone company. They explained that if I had listened to the whole message it would have told me to press *7 to stop it from calling back. When I hung up it assumed I didn’t get the message and that’s why it kept calling back. Jeez, which moron thought of that?

I have hung up on recordings. I have no idea what the recordings were, but it should be illegal for companies to alert their customers of important messages that way. What if a 2 year old or visiting foreign relative picked up the phone? Then the message would have been lost.

And I did once hang up on a phone company TM at 8AM on a Saturday. She called back 10 minutes later and 8AM in the mornings for weeks afterwards. That kind of person deserves a certain hell, but I’m sure never to be rude to TMs anymore.

44

My husband had a great responce to one call. I don’t remember what they were selling but he listened enough to make her think he was interested and then started on his own little “sale” of how evil technology was and scincerely explained how washing machines were the downfall of society and such and asked if the telemarketer would give him her home address so he could send her a pamphlet.
She’s the one who started scrambling for excuses and hung up. I could hear his side of it and nearly split a gut.

45

Probably not the best solution. The telemarketing computer flags the number as “error, try again later” instead of “leave me alone.” So you will get a LOT more calls from the same source at random times until some (stupidly large) counter overflows.

What we need is a “leave me alone” button or code sequence on the phone, like “*414” or whatever. Howabout making recognition of this feature by telemerketers a law?

46

Not only should it include telemerketers, but I would also put telemarketers on the list also. Wouldn’t want them dudes to feel left out. :slight_smile:

47

I tend to wait for them to take a breath, then say “sorry, I’m not interested” (or words to that effect). The results are mixed, though.

The best response was from someone fundraising for my alma mater. I told the person that I was not in the best of financial positions at the moment, and she asked if she could put my name down to be called back in a year. I was so touched that they weren’t going to call back for a whole year that I said yes. Heck, I might even give them some money next year.

The worst response was from some poor woman calling from a credit card company:

“Hello Mr. Milley, we’re calling from Some Credit Card Company You’ve Never Heard Of, and we’re offering you our new Titanium Diamond credit card with the low introductory interest rate of blah blah blah blah…”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in obtaining more credit at this time.” (I know, I shouldn’t have said “at this time”…but the caller didn’t offer to call back later, she just kept talking…)

“But Mr. Milley, if you apply right now you’ll receive blah blah blah…”

“Um…I’m not interested in obtaining more credit at this time.”

“But have you considered the advantages of our cash-back policy blah blah blah…”

“I’m going to say this one more time, and then I’m going to hang up. I’m not interested in obtaining more credit.”

(Real fast now) “Okay thank you Mr. Milley if you change your mind please call our toll-free number 1-800-555-2222 thank you bye!”

The poor woman was so obviously working off a script that I couldn’t force myself to be rude to her personally. So I have to wonder: who writes these scripts? And how many nasty things can we do to them?

48

Phone ringer off… Answering machine turned down. the only people that leave messages are family and creditors…

I’ve noticed a new trend… when I *69 a telemarketer I sometimes get a number, but when I try to CALL that number, it is officially a disconnected number… Thanks, phone compnay. How much does a service like THAT cost?

49

I don’t even answer the phone anymore, unless I recognize the name or number on my Caller ID. For telemarketers, it’ll come up as OUT OF AREA or PRIVATE CALL, and I don’t answer it. If it’s someone know and it comes up as that, I let the answering machine take it. If the call is important, they’ll leave a message and if it isn’t…oh well.

We’re always getting calls from Southwestern Bell. But yesterday they actually came to our door with a spiel. I couldn’t believe it. My dad kept trying to shoo the girl away, but she wouldn’t shut up. Finally he had to close the door on her. Are companies now sending out their Apostles from Hell instead of just calling?

50

So are drug dealers. That doesn’t make what they do right.

I usually just hang up on telemarketers. If I say anything, it’s only because they did something to really piss me off, like wake me up. Recently, I got a telemarketing call from MCI while I was having sex with my girlfriend. We pretty much have to answer the phone when it rings because it might be one of her teenaged kids, who are constantly in and out of the house and call for rides, etc. So I answered the phone, and this woman doesn’t get much farther than “Hi, I’m from MCI…” when I yelled something like, “You stopped me from having sex for this?!?” and just hung up. She was probably pretty amused.

I just mentioned this in another thread, but I’ll mention it again. You know how most telemarketing calls start with dead silence after you say, “Hello?” That’s because you’ve just been called by a “predictive dialer,” which decides whether to let a human handle the call or not based on what it hears. If it hears a short burst of sound (“Hello?”) followed by silence, it passes the call on to a human. If it hears a long string of sound (“Hi, this is the Buttholes, we’re not home right now…”) it assumes it’s found an answering machine and flags the number to be called back later. If, however, it hears the magic “boo-dee-deep!” tones that preceed a message like “This number is no longer in service,” it’ll flag the number as disconnected and never call again! So, the trick to defeating telemarketers is to screen your calls with an answering machine and use those tones at the beginning of your machine’s outgoing message. A sound file containing those tones can be found on my web site at http://www.bleeding-head.com/sit.wav or on the original site I got it from at ftp://ftp.gernsback.com/pub/pop/sit.wav. Have fun.

51

Has anyone else received the telemarketing hang-up call? The one where the automatic dialler dials a whole bunch of numbers including your number, you pick it up, there is a pause, and then click–they hang up because some poor shmuck picked up the phone before you did, so they’re stuck talking to the telemarketer instead? You can’t even ask them to take you off “the list”! (Therefore, they will call again.) This is harassment. If some kid was doing this, I could call the police, but since it’s a company, it’s legal. :mad:

If I’m busy or really fed up with telemarketers (they do seem to come in streaks around here, too), I screen calls with the answering machine. If one of them actually gets a hold of me, I interrupt them and say, “I’m not interested. Please don’t call me again” and then I hang up. Why should I waste my time and theirs waiting for a pause in their spiel? The whole reason telemarketing works at all (if it does or ever did) is because too many people are “polite” and telemarketers take advantage.

52

I don’t know the exact rules for harrassment for these guys, but I would guess, Boscibo, that calling you every five minutes counts. I did some light collecting and they told us we could be personally fined $50,000 for something like that, not to mention what would happen to the company. If it happens again get the name of the company at least and call the phone company. They are normally fairly helpful in tracking down phone harassers.

Also, I don’t know if this is a wide spread service, but they have it here in Denver. There is a pre-message put on your phone before you ever hear it ring. It says, “This number does not accept solicitation. If you are a telephone solicitor, hang up now. If not press 1.” It was annoying the first few times I heard it, but now I’m thinking I might want to get it.

53

There’s the Jerry Seinfeld approach:

“Sorry, I’m busy now, but if you give me your home phone number, I’ll call you back later…Why not? You say you don’t like being pestered when you’re at home? Well now you know how I feel!!” (hang up)

If you’ve got a live person calling, you could also start reading from MacBeth or Nietzsche in a freaky psychotic voice, or pretend that you’re in a heated argument with someone else in the room, or start singing “I love it when you call me Big Poppa.”

One guy got a call from someone selling some carpet cleaning crap, and said something like, “Do you have anything that gets out blood? I’ve got blood all over the place here!!!” He was just kidding, but the police soon arrived at his house.

Another approach is to completely ignore what the telemarketer says (if you are speaking to a live person) and start trying to sell them junk that’s been lying around your house collecting dust.

Or you could pretend like you are hard of hearing or can barely speak English.

Perhaps try the do-not-call list, or even better, the more general opt-out lists from credit bureaus.

54

One thing, for those of you who wait for a pause, have you noticed how many TMs tend to race through their spiel? It’s because TPTB realize that a lot of people simply WON’T interrupt them so they instruct the TMs to not provide a break in it.

I don’t get that many calls, maybe one a day, and if I pick up and there’s nothing there, I hang up. If it’s a human, I give them a second to find out where they’re calling from (in case it’s a real call) and then I break right in and say, “I’m not interested, thanks,” and hang up. If I got more calls I might get more hostile, I’ll admit, but I have friends who’ve done this job.

They often have quotas. Don’t make them waste their time on you by reading their whole script if you have no intention to take them on their offer, please. It’s a hellish job, but sometimes they don’t have much of a choice about it.

55

Wildwood had a fun way to mess with telemarketers on 9/4.

56

Musicat, my system has had a nominal amount of success:

Me: “Hello”
<pause of death>
TeleMarketer: “Hello?”
Me: “Hola!”

I usually make it to “No Habla Ingles” before the non-bilingual telemarketing firm puts me on their “really don’t call list” (which seems to result in less phone calls than being on their “don’t call” list).

Phone survey people, on the other hand, I’ll either talk to if I’m not busy, or at least try to entertain. My best attempt at the latter went like this:

“Will you be the decision maker the next time your family buys a car?”
“No.”
“Who will?”
“My cat.”
“Excuse me, your cat?”
“Yes, would you like to talk to him?”
“Um, will you be involved in the decision making process at all?”
“Oh yes. I go out and buy five or six of those automotive magazine, and I spread out all the pictures all over the living room floor, and then my cat lets me know which one he likes by falling asleep on it.”

Now, at this point I have to try really hard to not break character, and she’s trying really hard not to laugh in my face. I was completely content to keep going, but she had to spoil it by turning on the speaker phone. So I turned normal and hung up.

-LV

57

It depends on my mood. Usually I just ask to be put on their don’t call list. But occasionally if it’s someone of the opposite sex on the phone I’ll do something like this:

Woman: Hello, how are you today?
Me: Fine, and you?
Woman: I’m great, I was hoping to ask you if you are interested in widgets which…
Me: I’m sorry, can I ask a question before you start?
Woman: Sure!
Me: What are you wearing?
Woman: Excuse me.
Me: I’ll listen to what you have to say, but I want to know what you are wearing.

After that I get a “have a nice day”, usually through giggles. I once actually had a woman tell me what she was wearing. I then asked her if she was naked under those clothes. She giggled, told me to have a nice day, and hung up.

Sometimes you just got to have fun with them!

58

I discovered that having answering-machine messages in Esperanto scares them off. :smiley:
[sub]I haven’t been able to maintain a convincing Espernato in-person response yet though…[/sub]

The ones that really piss me off are the unending numbers of fax calls I get to my cellphone, as many as a dozen a week. I tried calling back, and got a recording which, after I ‘chose one’, instructed me in the fastest voice I have ever heard to ‘enter the number off the fax we just sent you to remove your number from our call lists’.

Idiots! How the hell can I read a fax that I can’t receive because your incompetently-set-up system doesn’t have the smarts to detect a voice line and flag it as off-limits?

And it always comes from a different number too… looks like it’s time to try pestie’s SIT-tone thing.

59

Here’s a question:

If telemarketing is sooooooooo unpopular and universally hated, then why is it flourishing?

60

If they’re trying to sell something, I just say I’m not interested. If they call again, I tell them that someone from their company has already called, and to place me on their ‘do not call’ list. I’m always polite, however.

But, if they’re trying to do a survey… I tell them that I can’t participate. Which, acutally, normally I can’t. You see, my Dad works in Market Research (the data/statistics end of things, crunching numbers, etc.), and the more paranoid companies out there know that you can tell a lot about what they’re going to do by what kinds of questions they ask. Thusly, if they’re worried about security (new product that they want to make sure hits the market before the compitition’s?) they will check to make sure you aren’t in Market Research/Marketing, or don’t have an immediate family memeber who is. Those that don’t ask (if I don’t feel like answering the questions) I tell them flat out that I can’t participate in surveys because of professional reasons/conflicts. (Normally gets us placed on the ‘do not call’ list pretty dang quick.) This also works in shopping malls, when they have the survey people milling about. There was one time when we told them we couldn’t because of my Dad’s job, and we were surprised when the survey-taker asked ‘Oh? Where does he work?’, and it turns out the survey was being done by another branch of the same company.

On the other hand… those that are not as careful/paranoid about who answers their surveys… It’s a hoot to listen to Dad go ahead and answer their questions, and then critique their survey and speculate what the purpose of the survey was.

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