Secrets of the Do Not Call list - Sort of
I just read this article - or, slideshow to be precise - about how to get a telemarketer to stop calling you and it rings absolutely true. I know this for a fact, not because I was once a telemarketer, but I did work for a company that made outgoing sales calls (under the guise of customer service follow-up) and we did all of the things outlined in this slideshow and more.
Since I will be spilling the beans, as it were, I'll use a pseudonym for the company I worked for in this capacity. Let's call it ... Laughing, Inc.
The system was not perfect - far less perfect than Laughing, Inc. would acknowledge publicly - and about 20% of the connections the website made were failed attempts. (That's a whole other story) My department's job was to call the consumer who may or may not have provided their contact information, apologize for the company and try and get them the service they requested while simultaneously trying to "upsell" them on additional or more costly services. There were actually additional commissions for upselling that was supposed to encourage us to push for those chances. Oh, you need a new toilet installed? Let me upsell you on a bathroom remodel.
We had a system based on Salesforce that allowed us to keep track of information such as what number we dialed, what time of day, who answered, length of call, and the outcome, as well as a few other metrics.
Like the article says, the system chooses who's going to get a call. The system would dump 200 names in our call queue every morning at 7AM and we would call through the list at our discretion. What that means is we could call based on time zone, alphabetically, by project type (if we wanted to work on that upsell) or even by how many days it had been since the consumer had been to our website. Some people liked to call the "1 days" or "2 days" because it was still fresh on the consumer's mind while others liked to call the "6" or "7" days because the consumer was usually flabbergasted at that point, and you were there to rescue them with your customer service.
We would inevitably have wrong numbers, false numbers or people irate that they were being called at all. These people would scream, punch a button to provide a tone, threaten you with bodily harm or sexual assault; threaten to track you down and burn your house, etc. For example, I personally had a guy ask me how far up my ass he could stick his arm before I screamed. I told him, "About 14 inches then we go out on our first date." That broke him, he laughed and hung up. My "coach" at the time told me not to get snarky with the assholes.
As for the Do Not Call (DNC), we were explicitly told: if someone says to put them on the Do Not Call List we were legally bound to put them on such list. Laughing, Inc. didn't want to pay hundreds of fines a day, or even a week. However, we were also taught how to avoid this and keep the people in the system to be recycled again in a week or two.
"They must use the term, 'Place me on your Do Not Call list."
If they simply stay, "don't call me again" then you recycle them back into the system. Technically, (and legally, I might add) you won't be calling them again, someone else in your department will. The same with "stop calling me" or any variation thereof. "Okay, I will not call you again." We were heavily advised to keep as many people in the system as possible. If you say, "Do not call this number again," then we put that number on a Do Not Call list and call another number, perhaps your house, cell, work, spouse, etc.
Use the Magic words: Place me on your Do Not Call list.
As the article states, any reputable company will place you on that list. However, in the case of Laughing, Inc. and probably most companies, if you come back to our website and look for more information you are agreeing to our Terms of Service (ToS) which allow us to contact you by telephone. Many people would demand to be placed on the DNC, then return to our website for additional services, breaking them from their request to be on the Do Not Call list. Which would only make them angrier when we did actually call. But hey, I didn't get paid $14/hr for nothing.
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