I Hear America Calling (Dave Barry)

[Dis]

I admit I once bought from a telemarketer .

Never again. I bought these stupid magazines from them. It was a 6 year deal!

Though it wasn't really that bad a ripoff. I payed a good price for the magazines, and they were magazines I was interested in. But by the end of the run, I was only interested in a couple of magazines. I grew tired of reading other ones.

[monkspider]

The only telemarketers I remember were ones for BMG. They were offering me 6 CDs for the price of 1! I told them I had an ad here that allowed me to get 12 for the price of 1. He didn't really have much to say after that, poor guys, they aren't given much to work with.

[DaShi]

It's kind of like tobacco. An industry that is extremely unhealthy and annoying to a great number of the public, but has made itself so ingrained into the economy that it is difficult to remove without some dire consequences. When it comes down to the line, Big Tobacco always throughs out the "think of the poor tobacco farmers" excuse.

[rah]

Originally posted by Berzerker
We've never gotten a telemarketer call except from charities we support. There may be a law or autodialers may work from publicly provided numbers, like from phone books. No, come to think of it, we did get a couple calls from pollsters but they may have been exempt if there is a law. Anyone familiar with telemarketers and autodialers? MtG?

You got calls from pollsters because they sometimes use random digit or raised digit dialing. (since if they eliminate all unlisted numbers from their survey, they are biasing the results.) This used to add an extra cost to surveys (because of the extra dialings) that sales firms didn't want to incur.

Random digit dialing is selve explanatory, and raised digit is taking existing phone lists and just adding a 1 or another number to it and dialing. Raised digit is usually a bit cheaper to call since phone numbers are usually assigned in blocks of numbers so you get more "real" numbers from raised digit vs. plan random digits.
But for raised digit you must start with an exisiting list that might cost more money than you would save by all the bad numbers when you random digit.

But with the new technologies available with auto-dialers/predictive dialers, the added expense has been greatly reduced. The main reason sales firms haven't taken advantage of this feature is because they're usually doing more targeted marketing. But some luxury item sales reps have started to use raised digit or random in phone exchanges that traditionally had higher income demographics. But, with the higher frequency of people's telephone number being portable when they move, this stratagy is becoming less effective.

[Q Classic]

You mean the people who were so dumb they got unlisted numbers long ago to avoid hassling with telemarketers and don't need a do not call list?

we have an unlisted number.

we stil get telemarketing calls.

[rah]

Even with an unlisted number, someone that has it may have sold it to a vendor, or it could be a random or raised digit call.

[Az]

This must be a good time to apologize to all of the telemarketers' foot soldiers; the students working part-time, the recently fired IT specialists, all of those poor souls which have no choice but to take this work, and thus have to endure both the highly unpleasant everyday work, and the occasional prank that is aimed at their employers, but actually punishes them.

[rah]

I've done both.
I've run highly ethical customer service call centers, and I've worked calling sleazy sales programs that were outright scams. (after a few months I quit once I realized just how bad a scam it was) The industry itself is to blame for the postition it now sits in. It reaps what it sows. Maybe if they were willing to truely police themselves effectively, they wouldn't be in this position.

[asleepathewheel]

I worked for a survey group once at my undergrad, Ole Miss, and these damn telemarketers screw up our work. If people hear that pause before the response or an odd number shows up on caller ID, they just hang up. I don't blame them, I would probably do the same thing. Hopefully once these telemarketers go out of business, real phone surveys, political and otherwise will be easier and more productive. I was calling kids about the effectiveness of the anti-tobacco ads in MS. Boy was that painful, first going through the parents and then the kids.