Telemarketing and Customer Loss

Telemarketers. Come on, admit it. You shuddered a little when you read that word.

Everybody's had to deal with them at some point in their lives. The calls during dinner, the way they just won't leave you alone no matter how many times you tell them to. They're essentially the reason that various Do No Call lists came about. So many people were making complaints about unsolicited calls and telephone harassment that there eventually got to be a list of people who did not want their numbers to be put on lists to be called about every little sale and promotion.

So if we all hate them so much, why do they keep calling?

I've had a bad few months when it comes to telemarketing calls. 9 times out of 10, they're calling for my roommate, trying to sell something or upgrade something or pitch some new product or collect for some charity. They call. And they call. And they call some more. It got to the point where one company was calling 3 or more times a day, and at that point I snapped and told them off for the constant harassment.

I felt bad about doing so. The person on the other line bears no ill will against me. They're not calling because they like to annoy people. They're calling because they need a paycheque and the autodialler just happened to pull my number out of its database. It isn't their fault, and I don't like having to vent my rage on them.

But everybody's got a breaking point, and that was mine.

I really have to ask myself how effective that sales strategy is. Getting so many calls in a day doesn't make me want to buy their company's product, just on principle! It makes me want nothing more to do with the company, in fact, and I know I'm not the only person to feel this way. Harassment as a form of sales pitch is not one that the general public enjoys having to sit through. So why do they do it?

There are a few reasons. One is because it's relatively cheap for the company, and their gains more than offset their losses. For every one person who gets fed up enough to end their association with the company, there are two people who'll buy into the scheme, and everyone else will just say no to that pitch and wait for the calls to begin anew next month. They gain more than they lose, in the end.

When you consider the fact that a lot of companies outsource to call centres in countries where they have to pay people less than what they'd have to pay locals, the venture becomes even more lucrative.

This, to me, is a rather upsetting trend. Sure, the people who buy whatever the telemarketer is selling are likely to be the ones who picked up the phone on the first call and thus weren't harassed for months at a time, but the attitude demonstrated by the company is one that I think a lot of people would be better off without. It shows that they care more about making a quick dollar than pleasing the customers they already have. It shows that money now is better than money later, that customer service can be sacrificed in the name of the Almighty Dollar, and heck, when some companies have a monopoly on services in some areas, a lot of people don't have a choice but to remain customers or else go without some service alltogether.

I hate to say it, but charities are one of the worst offenders when it comes to telemarketing. Not because they call all the time (they do), but because of the guilt-trip they lay on each person they call. It's one thing to say that you don't want to upgrade your long-distance plan or subscribe to digital cable channels. It's another thing entirely to say that you won't donate money to help starving orphans in Africa, help fund what may be a medical breakthrough for cystic fibrosis, or support a volunteer fire brigade. It doesn't matter whether you can't afford it right then. After the sob story they always tell about the lives that could be improved or save, you feel like a heartless jerk for saying no.

But it works. The guilt-trip makes people shell out money. On one hand, that's good, because charities serve an excellent purpose. On the other hand, when you only do it because you feel too guilty not to, you've got to stop and wonder if things are being done the right way.

As I said before, the more a company calls me and tries to get my money, the less likely I am to give it to them, and the more likely I'm going to end up reporting them for harassment. The Do Not Call lists only stretch so far, after all. They don't stop calls coming through when they're from companies that you have an association with, or third-party companies affiliated with a company you have an association with. (Ones who act on behalf of that primary company, mostly.) Which means you still haver to put up with calls from your bank, your credit card company, your telephone company, and a whole slew of others.

Think reporting them for harassment is taking it a step too far? I don't. When it reaches the point of three calls each day for weeks on end, it's harassment. One call a day is annoying enough. Three is excessive, and unnecessary. So yes, I threaten them with a harassment report. And I'm within my rights to do so, technically, especially if I've already given them a verbal notice to stop calling.

Companies need to know their limits. They often do know their legal limits (if not their moral ones...), but what a lot of them bank on is YOU not knowing your rights as a customer. They hope that you don't realise that you can get them into trouble for the excessive and aggressive marketing they do, or ignoring your requests to receive no more calls. There's a reason a lot of companies make it very convoluted to be put on their specific Do Not Call list. They want you to give up in frustration so that they can keep on calling you, so that you can remain a potential source of additional revenue for them. While they claim to care about your rights as a customer, they're all secretly hoping that you don't care enough about them.

Case in point, a bank kept calling me regarding my mother's credit card. We both told them, repeatedly, that my number was not one at which they could reach her. Repeatedly I was apologized to and told that my number would be taken off her account. Calls would stop for a month, and then start up again. This was another one that got to the point of three calls a day, and most annoyingly, most of those calls took me to an answering service that informed me that all agents were busy and if I could leave a message, they'd get back to me as soon as possible. They made one call too many. I left a message one day, explainint the situation for the umpteenth time, demanding that they remove my number from my mother's account (and stated that I'd been told a few times in the past that this should already have been done), and saying quite angrily that if they called about this one more time I'd report them for harassment.

I have yet to receive another call from them. They knew, ultimately, that they couldn't get away with it. I said the magic words and they had to take me seriously, because I was in the right and they weren't.

Now, that being said, that sort of situation is a rare one in which that bank was making some serious screw-ups. Not all companies who use telemarketers are in that boat. But the point still stands. If you know your rights and are sick of them hounding you about things you've already said no to, tell them to leave you alone or you'll take it a step further. It's up to you whether that "step further" will mean discontinuing your association with them, reporting them, or both. But you have the option, and you don't need to put up with harassing calls every day.

Perhaps if enough people do this, more companies will start remembering that giving excellent customer service is a better way the generate revenue than to hound people needlessly about a quick sale. Better service means a better company, and word of mouth can do wonders.

That goes both ways, too. There's a saying that for every one person who says something positive about a company or product, there'll be ten people saying something negative. So in that vein, if a company is harassing you, there's no need for you to stay quiet about it either. They ought to know that their actions have consequences, and one of those consequences could be a drop in revenue when word gets out that they don't treat their customers well.

Customers have a lot more power than most companies want to admit.