Telemarketers on the ropes

CINCINNATI BUSINESS COURIER ^ | 8/11/2003 | Lance Williams

[xrp]

Popular do-not-call list bringing industry to its knees

Aug. 11 — In the past three months, the hallways at Groesbeck-based Tel-A-Sell Marketing Inc. have become a lot less crowded. CEO Edd O’Connor has been forced to trim his telemarketing staff from 72 to 18.

“I WAS RUNNING a full house earlier this year,” said O’Connor, who also serves as president of the American Teleservices Association’s Great Lakes Chapter, which covers Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Michigan.

One of the big reason for the cuts: the chilling effects of the National Do Not Call Registry and other similar efforts in statehouses across the country.

A month into the sign-ups for the federal Do Not Call list, nearly 30 million phone numbers across the United States have been registered for the list. That number could double by the time the list takes effect on Oct. 1.

The ATA, which is challenging the list in court, said the national list could eventually cause more than 2 million lost telemarketing jobs. The ATA estimated that telemarketers are responsible for $660 billion in sales. The combined effects of do-not-call lists and the movement of jobs overseas have left the industry ailing.

“It’s going to cause significant business problems for this industry,” said O’Connor, who said he expects a pickup in business in early fall. “We’ve got to step back and regroup.”

[Revolting cat!]

Such lovely private FReepmail should be made public, doncha agree? Advertise your superior intellect, I always say!

"Re: Telemarketers on the ropes
From xrp | 08/12/2003 5:09 AM PDT read

No, dumbass, I have a real job, it isn't telemarketing. Get over yourself."

[HiTech RedNeck]

For the life of me I can't figure out why this would lose a single telemarketing job. The list of eligible numbers gets smaller, but those numbers get called more often. What's more the sales success rate would rise. Maybe this is what will cut the jobs! -- it takes longer to consummate a sale than to give an unsuccessful pitch.

[FourPeas]

Had the industry been self-policing this would never have happened. Telemarketers cut their own throats by making major mistakes:

1. They wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Continuing to call after a prospect told them they weren't interested.

2. They wouldn't let the prospect say 'no', continuing on with the pitch even when the prospect tried to interrupt. (Yes, I know this is an old sales tactic, but when put with everything else, it just added to telemarketers downfall.)

3. They didn't seem to care that calling someone at the dinner hour is rude.

4. They didn't seem to care that calling someone at home is, in fact, coming into their home uninvited. First, it's rude and second, when asked to leave it's unthinkable not to apologise, depart and not come back unless asked.

5. They used sleazy tactics to trick old people into buying stuff they really didn't want or need. (Yes, this too is an age old tactic, but again, it all adds up.)

6. They didn't do their research. Mass calling people telling them you have an answer to a problem they don't have is even more annoyance added onto the above.

7. They hired people who don't speak well, don't speak the language or are rude.

8. They didn't care that when, en masse, their prospects cried aloud, "cut it out", that it was not a good idea to then start whining about telemarketers rights.

9. They want to blame those whose homes in which they are intruding for not finding ways to ignore them. Insisting that prospects need to take the initiative to ignore something coming into their house unwanted is idiotic. (When I had a terminally ill father and children sleeping, it's entirely unrealistic to say that the onus is on me to either turn each of my four phones off and possibly miss an important last phone call from my dying father or have my children awakened by someone trying to sell me something I don't want.)

10. They didn't seem to care that the automated dialers that call and then hang up if there isn't a salesperson available is beyond rude. This is a rude childish prank, not a valid marketing tool.

11. They automated the sales pitch, making the prospect listen through the whole pitch if they wanted to receive the right digit to press so the prospect wouldn't have to continually receive the same pitch, blatantly disregarding any courtesy for their prospects.

Frankly the telemarketers whine sounds a lot like the whine of a former neighbor who couldn't understand why, after he insisted on blaring his music at 2am regardless of my, and other neighbors', requests for quiet, the police knocked on his door. It's just not that hard to understand if you think about it.

[discostu]

They did it to themselves. LOOOOONG before he national list got passed these companies were forced by law to have their own don't call lists and there were heafty fines for continued harassment. But the telemarketers did everything in their power to make it nearly impossible to get on the list. Had they simply realized that people who wanted on the list never were going to buy their crap and made it easy for people to stop the damned phone calls the national list never would have happened.

Also if they would have been smart about NOT calling during dinner time, and done a little demographic research so they didn't call apartment dwellers and try to sell them new roofs, and learned how to take no for an answer.

Don't blame us for telemarketers destroying their business. They were using a service WE were paying for to try to sell us junk we didn't want. That's theft, stopping theft is a legitimate use of government.

[discostu]

Well said.

[jimt]

Please enlighten me as to how American legislation will affect spammers from the other 199 countries in the world.

International agreements should do the trick. We don't spam you, wasting your bandwidth, server space, etc., and you don't spam us. Spam is a curse destroying the 'net. When over half the traffic is for folks playing theft of service, the magnitude of the ripoff is immense.

Our small IT department has come up with a relay server running on Linux which filters all emails and puts "***SPAM***" in the subject line of junk email. Simple client rules dump those in a special folder for review. So far, it's hitting 90% with 0% false positives. After a month or so of review, it will simply "bounce" detected spam back, without manual intervention.

The thing is, we should not have to waste time, a server, and programming to avoid theft of service. Spammers belong in jail, just like other thieves.

[jimt]

Glad to see that you allow emotion to interfere with conservatism thievery.

As well she should. Every American ought to be incensed at this ripoff of service, and also at how long the goobermint's taken to rein in the thieves. They finally protect our rights and you call it big brother ?! Give me a break.

[Revolting cat!]

Door to door salesmen are taught, we were once told by a former solicitor and now a FReeper, that people who hang "NO SOLICITORS" signs on their doors (or "NO PEDDLERS", as the cat does,) are easy marks, people who don't know how to say "no". If there is something to it, then you can imagine that many of the 30 million who signed up for the "Do Not Call" list used to be the telemarketers best customers! Just a wild guess...

[Billthedrill]

Touchy issue, actually. I'm the last one to be solving a problem like this with legislation, but there doesn't seem to be any other free-market choice. It's gone well past "minor annoyance." I have a number that's been mine for about a decade now, plenty of time for it to proliferate through the multitude of lists. I'll get an average of six to eight calls a night, going up to nearly a dozen toward the end of the month (when the sample runs low - I used to do data processing at a market research company and I know how this call-list process works.)

Just the phone ringing that much constitutes an annoyance and an interruption. But there are specific practices common to the industry which make it worse than it has to be and which have generated far more hostility than they ever could profit.

One of these is the refusal to use caller ID. Presumably if all they're interested in is people who are interested in them, this would not be necessary. In fact, the effort taken to circumvent this shows that this is not the case.

Another is repeated callbacks to non-answering numbers. Market researchers are careful to limit this to two or fewer because irritating people skews the answers and makes them unusable. Telemarketers have no such constraints. One that I could trace called me back five times in a single evening. "Answer or your phone will ring off the hook" is not salesmanship, it's harrassment.

Another is abuse of phone machine messages. This is illegal in some states (Washington, for example) but sometimes happens anyway. For those of us with machines with a limited capacity - mine is 15 minutes - this practice can prevent the machine being used for the reason I bought it - emergency messages from family, for instance. Demanding that I purchase a machine with greater capacity to acccommodate the desires of someone else to force advertising on me is not only unfair, it's futile - unless you have a machine with infinite capacity you won't be able to keep up.

Still another is the misuse of Random Digit Dialing - this is a system really only warranted when a random distribution across an area code is required, which is not a great deal of the time. It is, however, exceedingly cheap and easy to program. This industry has such a low profit margin that cheating is encouraged, and this is one principal cheat that is nearly impossible to catch.

And that's the principal reason for all of these abuses, together comprising a problem of sufficient magnitude to cause even a libertarian-leaning feller like me to throw up my hands and let the government in. It's reached the point where refusing to answer the phone and allowing the answering machine to screen calls, as I do, still can't keep the level of disruption to an acceptable point without disabling phone communications altogether between the hours of 5:00 PM and 9:00 PM (local). If I could dream up a free-market alternative to regulation I'd prefer it, but it's going to take somebody a little cleverer than I.

[js1138]

A simple annoyance that can be remedied by hanging up, using caller ID or an answering machine is going to result on a bunch more people drawing unemployment checks.

This is not a simple annoyance. Telemarketers are using a device I pay for to intrude in my home. I do screen calls with caller-id and the answering machine, but right now I have a father in the hospital, and every call makes my heart jump. If the phone companies had a service to block this, I would subscribe, but they don't, so I welcome the feds.

[Arthalion]

Please enlighten me as to how American legislation will affect spammers from the other 199 countries in the world.

Go after the source! We need to establish that that the legal liability for spam is SHARED by the company that hires the spammer. The people sending the spam are rarely the same ones selling the viagra pills, penis enlargers, and porn sites...the actual spammers are usually third-party companies hired specifically to send the email. The spammers will start seeing REAL hits to their bottom lines when their customers start getting sued for THEIR actions! If YOUR company hires SpamSender Inc to send 15,000 spam messages to advertise YOUR product, YOU should be held liable for a fair amount of damages (say...$100 per email, we've got to make this HURT!)

And what about international sellers? You WOULDN'T have to sue them in foreign courts, you could sue them in U.S. courts and get a judgement here (the offense was committed here, so it's U.S. jurisdiction). After that, you can have all of their incoming products seized by Customs until they either pay up or go out of business!

Believe me, if these companies start suffering real financial damage, they'll stop hiring the spammers to hawk their products.

[discostu]

Because you have to pay for the minutes telemarketing calls on your cell phone are illegal, that's why you're not getting those calls.

[glennaro]

I agree completely with your assessment. It brings to mind a description of the intrusion of the unsolicited telemarketing call by Brian Daugherty in the current issue of Reason as:
"(the) privacy-shattering powers of the telephone, a device that allows strangers to set off alarms in your house simply by punching a few numbers on a remote keypad."

[discostu]

You should report them. Because cell contracts make you pay for minutes in both directions they're not supposed to be calling cell phones, they get a one shot forgiveness because cell numbers and land numbers are indistinguishable (big mistake on MaBell's part IMHO), but once you tell them they're now liable. This is something that's under enforced.

[nravoter]

Are you harrassed when you open a magazine and see ads? How about when they cut to commercials on TV?

Magazine and TV ads don't wake me up when I'm working nights and sleeping days to try to get me to participate in some assinine survey or make me feel guilty for not coughing up cash to some cause or other.

I know, I know: I should turn off the ringer when I sleep.

And not get emergency calls from work or my family.

Telemarketers can suck it up.

[johnb838]

Only problem is that nobody understands what the hell they're marketing.

And therein lies the rub of using Indians to do knowledge work for peanuts instead of paying Americans what it costs to live here. The culture is soo different that what you wind up with is a bunch of crap. They can speak perfect english and I don't understand a word of it.

[xrp]

Ok, I have a solution for all of this. Start charging for local calls only and charge more for long distance. Likewise charge for emails sent. This way, you still have the freedom to call wherever, whenever you want and it becomes cost prohibitive for telemarketers and spammers to do their thing.

Every think this is a good idea?

[sandydipper]

I'm on the do not call list and I hope all the butt heads that call telemarketing a profession end up unemployed - good bye. Go get a decent job and leave dinner time uninterrupted.

[johnb838]

One problem is that caller ID costs $10 a month now, here in Texas, probably more in Rio Linda. When I realized that, I decided I wasn't going to pay $120 per year to avoid these *ssholes and I had it turned off. Now I just do not answer the phone and make people leave a message. It sucks and I wish we could go back to the days when the phone rang and you answered it, period, end of, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Another thing with the spam, now they send these shockingly, disgustingly graphic jpg's with the spam message on the graphic itself. Spam catcher can't do anything about that. I mean these things are awful, degenerate feces. I can't imagine why they think anyone would willingly respond, especially since word has gotten around that if you answer one of these your spam load doubles.