There are many controversial practices within certain industries, cosmetics have animal testing, sports events have ticket touts, cinema has DVD piracy, and farming has seal-clubbing…don’t worry, I’m joking. No, possibly the worst of these (excluding seal-clubbing) is that arm of marketing and advertising that leaves us so infuriated that we often resort to abuse, Tele-sales.
As with everything maddening, there are degrees of annoyance. I would much rather receive a sales call than, say, see my house burgled, by a Big Brother winner, on a Monday, in Hemel Hempstead, whilst the salient realisation dawns on me that I am in fact naked. Thankfully that can never happen, as it almost technically illegal to move to Hemel Hempstead, but nevertheless, there are degrees. So where does telemarketing stand on the great scale of vexation? Do we really hate these calls as much as we claim? Or are they just an excuse to vent our daily angers at a faceless innocent?
We have within our power the ability to hang up the call at any moment, so why do we make such a drama of how these calls are the plague of our existence, steaming like a pot of mussels after each and every call we receive? The main reason I can attribute this to is the interruption, the glacial nonchalance of the sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.
Having had first hand experience of working in a call centre, for which I apologise and feel remorseful to my very core, I can unequivocally declare that there is a beating heart of unalloyed malevolence pumping nothing but a disgustingly nefarious ethic in to the minds of their staff, many of whom are still relatively impressionable. On a day to day basis we would be taught how to deal with the anger and retaliatory nature of a large percentage of our unsuspecting victims. We would be trained to react with politeness but determination, and to keep selling until the potential customer had hung up. That for me was the hardest element of the job, I have no objection to speaking to strangers, and to some extent I have no objection to a hard sell, but I could not bring myself to bludgeon my way in to these peoples lives, pretend to be their best friend, and worst of all act as though I was working for someone I wasn’t.
Without naming names, I was told that my introductory speech should read something akin to “Good morning sir/madam, my names Steve and I’m calling on behalf of xxxx”. Like i said, naming no names, but for the xxxx you can replace with Google, O2, Microsoft, and many more.
‘On behalf of’, what a ridiculously ambiguous statement, and I completely understood the callers need for clarification, which happened a large number of times. The largest chunk of my time was spent appointment setting, and seminar booking, which is the easier end of the scale in terms of the product you are trying to sell. These seminars were aimed largely at the technology sector, so I was calling IT Technicians and Directors, who frankly will have known of my ‘products’ beforehand through alternate media if they were in the slightest interested, and the bookings I made I can only accredit to luck.
So where is the defence for telemarketing? I don’t believe this case is quite finished just yet, although I know I can not metamorphose the truth in to something truly acceptable.
If we remove all inimical thoughts and take a look at the calls through set of clean eyes, or should that be ears? We see that in most cases there are offers here that would be beneficial to us, they would enhance our life should we accept them and give these calls a fair chance. One of the most common calls I receive is from Vodafone trying to extend/modify my contract, and recently I came to the end of my contract and predictably got that call to renew. I took this as an opportunity to see if I could work this to my favour, having heard many stories of people bartering a good deal. I was originally paying £40/month on a fairly comprehensive package, and had just a couple of months previously received a new phone from them, the model of which I forget, but suffice to say it was nothing remarkable. Having nothing to lose, I said I would renew so long as they sent me a Nokia N95 8Gb, and dropped my monthly rate for the same package, and to my joy this is exactly what they did. I am now on exactly the same package, with a rather brilliant phone, and paying precisely half of my original monthly fee.
This is just one example, but I’m sure if we were all truthful with ourselves, we could admit to other examples of this nature of experience, an experience that would never have happened were it not for some sweaty, spotty post-grad student sat in a call centre somewhere in between a village called Affluence and a city called I Wasted Three Years On A Degree.
My view is that rather than instantly becoming irritated at hearing that overly polite introduction, is to disregard the voice, and listen to the words, to take away from the call the information to make an informed decision as to whether their offer will benefit you or not. This is not an easy achievement of that I am acutely aware, but the person on the other end of the phone may be someone just like me, who needs an injection of cash after a relocation and actually doesn’t want to ruin your day at all.