Cold call contacts - preference services and turning off spam sales approaches
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2011-11-03 06:59:40 - Graham Ellis
A telephone call yesterday, and the young lady introduced herself as Ellie, and started to talk to me about financial planning. She explained that her boss would be in the area next week, and asked if he could meet.
"It's funny you should call today - just a couple of hours after a conversation I was having with my wife ..." I said, and you could here the sparkle in her acknowledgement of that "... because we get a lot of calls, and just today we were talking about this and I have registered our numbers with the telephone preference service ..." Poor Ellie couldn't apologise quickly enough - she said she had checked (and I how do doubt she had - registation takes a while to go through) - actually one of the better ones who does take note, and the call ended friendly.
I have a great deal of time for people doing their job ... but there are some jobs that simply should not exist, or be run as they are by the bosses. And that applies (in my opinion) to the jobs where people are asked to call numbers that are TPS listed, and if challenged give one of the following reasons:
1. Only applies to caller from within the UK
2. You are already a customer / signed up (e.g. appear in our telephone / business directory, probably as a free enty in someting like Thomson Local)
3. This is not a cold call - following up an email
4. I am not selling anything - I am doing market research / setting up appointments
5. Your Registration must have run out / must not yet be active
Those may (or may not) be true when used - and several are what I consider to be loopholes. I particularly dislike the companies who use an offshore call centre to cold call, and use this to sidestep the Telephone Preference laws. Don't they realise that someone who's taken active steps to request that such calls are NOT made is unlikely to provide them with a positive outcome / good return on their time invested? And don't they realise that damaging their company's name with the person they're calling by using sidestep techniques. Or are they so arrogantly sure that their product is so different and so worthwhile that - once we speak to them - we'll want it anyway!
The telephone preference service may be found [here] online. There is also a fax preference service [here] and a mail (post) preference service [here]. I note that even in the preference service world, there are cold callers who will ask you for payment for them to complete your registration. To quote from the front page of the mail preference service - "Be wary of people calling you claiming to be from the Telephone (Mailing) Preference Service asking for payment to complete your registration. MPS is a FREE service."
At Well House Consultants / Well House Manor, unsolicited / cold sales calls and recorded "information" messages take a great deal of our time. It's not only the time taken by the call, but the time taken to get and into the groove of what the person who answers the phone was doing - often complex design and programming work. So we do not welcome calls from people who are looking to buck the spirit of what we have elected for.
When we were hiring, we specified "email us or walk in" and the people who were able to follow that simple instruction were the ones who got the jobs. It shows that they fit in, that they can take instruction, and that they have a respect for working with us in a way that works for us.