• NEW How I defeated their "Call Progress Detection"!
  
  
• Home to the Telemarketing Scum Page
• Index to the Telemarketing Scum Page
  
  
  (this page:)
• Reasons for criticizing telemarketers
• Charities (actually their contractors)
• Legitimate Users of Telemarketing
• Excuses for Telemarketing
• Telemarketing Discriminates Against the Poor
• More on the Economics
• More on the Economics including getting rid of local telemarketers

But There are Good Telemarketers

The problem is the bad ones. There are too many people who:

Call people who have not "opted in" to receive commercial calls.

Some boiler rooms have been telling gullable employees that their victims are vetted from various surveys or contests. So when was the last time you saw a checkbox on a warranty card that said, "Please sell my number to whomever will buy it."? Incidentally, people who think contests are silly and who don't bother with surveys will still get calls. See lunchtime project.

Lie about their employer's identity.

If someone asks, "Who is your employer?" why is it necessary to lie? (There are certain parts of the country where dishonesty at the request of an employer is respected, but the person you are lying to lives elsewhere and doesn't share that sense of dishonesty.) See No Identity.

Use predictive dialers which hang up on victims.

It doesn't take much to figure out that the next call comes on-line immediately.

Use lists generated by robotic message dialers.

If you're dialing from a list and getting a large number of live answers, there's probably a reason.

Lie about products or services.

Use tricks on customers.

e.g., asking "okay" as a request for acknowledgement of a statement, but registering the "okay" as acceptance. There are some people (called "scum") who have no problem with doing that.

If your company does some of these things, spread the word inside and outside the company. If it's something illegal, take notes (outside of the "office") and give the information to the authorities when you leave.

But There Are Ads Everywhere

Except for Telescum, I don't recall having to get up, at the convenience of the advertiser, in order to receive an ad on a service I pay for. I don't have a radio or TV which turns itself on, only to request that I politely say "no thank you" to an ad. Telemarketing calls are not a commercial sponsor of my friends' calls. It turns out that I am in a large part paying for those ads, in the form of my basic phone bill, and increased costs of handling the call traffic incurred by my dialtone provider.

"We don't want to talk to people who don't want to talk to us."

So telemarketers are welcoming "do not call" lists?

Why Not Say 'No Thank You'

Because my mother never taught me to be polite to ads or intruders.

"Thank you" is an expression of appreciation. I am not alone in considering telescum calls an obnoxious intrusion. Am I thanking them for interrupting me or for deliberately not limiting their calls to people who request their "service"?

Charities

I suppose that, "the means justify the ends. We're having a hard time raising money, so let's resort to telemarketing."

It's not uncommon for the sleezeball charity to get 25 cents on the dollar generated by telemarketers.

The 25% figure may be outdated. I was told by two telemarketers that they "guarantee" their proported client 15%. That means they can keep 85%! (Who are the suckers who fall for this without asking how much goes to the proported beneficiary? And what about the sleezball charities who cooperate by accepting these "services"?)

Charities lose funds.

If you receive an unsolicited call from someone you contributed to, never contribute to them again. After all, they have demonstrated their contempt for you. There are enough other worthy organizations out there.

Surveys

It is very unlikely that any product has ever been improved by a marketing survey... with one exception. Mailing lists.

Legitimate Users of Telemarketing

- Religious and other Member Organizations calling their own members or participants - they have a direct contact with the person called, and are generally responsible for maintaining goodwill by not abusing the privilege of calling -- much like a friend calling a friend.

- Businesses targeting people who cannot be reached by any other way. The only group I can think of is headhunters (executive search firms), but I'm sure there are others. Note that headhunters and the like are typically not using predictive dialers.

- Political campaigns, provided that they are open as to their purpose. I don't like being called, but at least that's a legitimate exercise of free speech. 'Push poll' callers and other callers not openly stating their purpose deserve to be treated like any other telemarketing scum.

Excuses for Telemarketing

We need to promote our business.

Try print ads, media ads, building a solid reputation, or not being sleezeballs.

People want us to call.

What are you doing to make sure you only call those who request unsolicited phone calls?

We're just making money.

Can't you sell drugs to kids, or try prostitution? Both would be less intrusive.

It brings us the most business (or donations).

from someone else. I'll go elsewhere.

You can't curtail our freedom of expression.

We'll try. In the U.S., the Constitutional right of free speech has been limited where the form of expression has been intrusive. As an example, localities may restrict loudspeaker broadcasts, even of a non-commercial nature. In the case of telemarketing, other advertising media is available.

but Aren't These All Oppressed Single Mothers?

These companies will pay whatever sub-minimum wage they have to in order to keep their employees. At least until they can be replaced. So if every second call results in a sale, the commission would be a lot lower than if every 100th call results in a sale. By consuming time without buying, all you are doing is "shifting the bell curve," so to speak.

If everyone consumes 10 minutes per call ... well, everyone won't do it, but.. if a statistically significant number of people consumed time, then their costs go up. That means less calls, but what about our Oppressed Single Mothers?

Presumably there are useful services that can employ these people. Inbound telemarketing. Telemarketing for people who "opt-in."

Telemarketing Discriminates Against the Poor

The rich are no longer being victimized by telemarketing scum.

The reason is simple - People with a combination of caller ID and an answering service are no longer answering their phones to "unavailable" (T-1) lines. More advanced equipment including mailboxing answering machines allow the person called to route such calls to a message machine. If the caller is calling from a T-1 line (large office or calling card), they simply imput a code. In the US, telescum calls theoretically stop at 9PM (21:00), so late callers get through in any case.

A service offered by dialtone providers also permits "announcement" calling, in which the user is prompted to voice an announcement to "punch through" without a code. (If the telescum responds to the machine, the person called then answers the phone but only hears the announcement. This defeats quasi-legal forms of predictive dialers.)

More on the Economics

Okay, 'splain it to me like I'm a 5-year old!

Okay, let's say the telescum can set up their predictive dialers to call enough victims that their flunkys are always busy, and the average call is 25 seconds. Make it 25 seconds for each failed attempt. Then each "station" can pick up 2 victims each minute.

If 50% of the people hang up on them after 5 seconds, then the average time per call is 15 seconds. So each "station" picks up 4 victims each minute. (More like 3 because of delays between calls)

Now, let's presume that 5% of the victims take up an average of 8  minutes per call. That doubles the average time they spend per call. The costs of their harrassment nearly double.

So that is why telescum are becoming more savy about people wasting the telescum's time.

But then it becomes entertainment for the victim. Perhaps they go through motions to order the service (being sure to avoid minimum fees, etc.) Now the cost of the successful sale increases. There are two reasons for this:

• The time and effort taken to attempt to "close" the non-sale.
• The additional precautions they must take when they close a sale with a bonafide sucker (a successful sale).

This ia a lot like the economics of "shrinkage" at a real store, except in this case of course there's no theft or illegal activity by the victim/targets.

An Example

An agency calls for newspaper subscriptions. The victim expresses interest in the sale (good!) and keeps the agency on the line. By the the time the victim is done looking up a tanning saloon in the phone book, a good 5 or 10 minutes have gone by. Now the victim got confused and gives the address of the tanning saloon, and the call is verified by the supervisor. This took 2 more calls because the victim simply accepted and hung up the first time..

Now the paper tries to deliver to the tanning saloon, with all that entails. They don't really like the stories about melanomia and refuse the subscription. So the paper calls back and again asks for whatever wierd name the original victim gave. (The wierd name tips off the victim.) The victim then gives the name of another tanning saloon, so the cycle repeats itself. Pretty soon the newspaper gets the message.

If you count the cost of operating the telephone boiler room, the costs of attempting delivery, and all of the clerical costs, the simple harassment of the victim cost the newspaper between $20 and $100! The risk to the victim would be the week's subscription.

Moreover, the newspaper would be stupid not to "blacklist" that victim's phone number. If they're "angry" enough, they may even refuse to sell that number to other local telemarketers. ("angry" in quotes because corporations can't have emotions!)

Courtesy of Stan Protigal

Seattle Community Network
SCN Member Pages

site first posted November 3, 1996 ~~ rev August 22, 2004 ~~ written in WordPerfect 5.1 and works best with ~~ copyright 1996, 2001 by the authors ~~ Feel free to link to this.