The other day Joy posted a “Question of the day” about telemarketers and when I got this one in my inbox I just thought aha! So Joy here are my ideas LOL… and I would so do them as well!
- Tell them to talk VERY SLOWLY, because you want to write EVERY WORD down.
- Insist that the caller is really your buddy Leon, playing a joke. “Come on Leon, cut it out! Seriously, Leon, how’s your momma?”
- Tell the telemarketer you are busy at the moment and ask them if they will give you their HOME phone number so you can call them back. When the telemarketer explains that they cannot give out their HOME number, you say “I guess you don’t want anyone bothering you at home, right?” The telemarketer will agree and you say, “Now you know how I feel!”
- After the telemarketer gives their spiel, ask him/her to marry you. When they get all flustered, tell them that you could not just give your credit card number to a complete stranger.
- Tell the telemarketer you are on “home incarceration” and ask if they could bring you a case of beer and some chips.
- If they want to loan you money, tell them you just filed for bankruptcy and you could sure use some money.
- If MCI calls trying to get you to sign up for the Family and Friends plan, reply, in as SINISTER a voice as you can, “I don’t have any friends… would you be my friend?”
- Cry out in surprise, “Judy! Is that you? Oh my God! Judy, how have you been?” Hopefully, this will give Judy a few brief moments of pause as she tries to figure out where the hell she could know you from.
- If they say they’re John Doe from XYZ Company, ask them to spell their name. Then ask them to spell the company name. Then ask them where it is located. Continue asking them personal questions or questions about their company for as long as necessary.
- When they ask “How are you today?” Tell them! “I’m so glad you asked because no one these days seems to care, and I have all these problems; my arthritis is acting up, my eyelashes are sore, my dog just died…”
Joy
•14 years ago
LMAO! This is great. Where did you find it? OMG I love #1. Your so funny.
angryafrican
•14 years ago
Haha! Gonna use this. Current strategy?
1. Tell them my throat is sore and that they shold just keep on talking. I then put the phone down and let them talk away. It’s their money. Maybe leave the phone with the cat so they hear some noise in the background.
2. For post. Collect crap and send it back in prepaid envelope attatched.
mssc54
•14 years ago
I wish I knew how to find it but there is this comedian who has fun with a telemarketer.
When the telemarketer calls he tells him that he has just called a crime scene, asks him what his relationship is with the deceased, when was the last time he saw the deceased, he (the detective) needs him to come down the the station house for questioning.
It’s hillarious.
vishesh
•14 years ago
oh of course but i had a uncle in _____ country.He died recently and if you give me 5000 $ i will transfer the money to your account,as i am in the most wanted list of CIA.You know Pres.Bush told he will do it,but then he lost a lot of money,or at least he tried to act like he did,what with the bail out and all…. đŸ˜›
hows that? đŸ˜› bad na… đŸ˜›
mindexplosion
•14 years ago
hahaha, love it!!
Aaarti
•14 years ago
hahaha.. damn good ones.. am planning on using a couple of them next time i get a call!!! đŸ™‚
neilina
•14 years ago
I really made me to laught. I am copying them to paste them in-front of my cupboard, so that whenever I will get call from them, I can surely bang them with all such answers. Hey, thanks đŸ™‚
neilina
•14 years ago
opps! Type – It
neilina
•14 years ago
opps! Typo – It
glaize
•14 years ago
Wow! You just made my day!
Visionary
•14 years ago
The poor souls who call you up are not the enemy. They are ordinary people like you and me, trying to earn a living and feed a family doing a shitty job.
The moment they arrive at work, they are chained to their desk by their headset like slaves to the oars of a pirate ship. The second they unplug from their terminal to go take a pee, a supervisor is informed electronically and the clock starts ticking. More than 5 minutes away from the desk and it’s a disciplinary offence. Too long on a call and it’s a disciplinary offence. Not enough calls in a shift and you guessed it, a disciplinary offence.
The poor soul talking to you didn’t call you up either; they are almost as much of a victim as you are in this unsolicited telephone conversation. Until you answer your phone they don’t know to whom they will be talking to and will probably have no idea why they are talking to you either. Letting them dial the number would waste far too much time and may give them the opportunity to slow down a bit if they were getting worn down trying to talk to people who really don’t want to hear from them.
Instead a computer program called a predictive dialler does a complex bit of maths and works out the call centres flow rate based on how many headsets are plugged in to terminals and how long the average call is taking. The predictive dialler then places a call to your telephone number obtained from a database. When you answer your phone, the predictive dialler connects you to the next free headset. If there isn’t a free headset, you will have just become the victim of yet another dead call. If there is a free headset, the telesales operative is force-fed another unpleasant phone call.
The call centre may be running campaigns for any number of companies or products. The only thing that knows why you have been called is the predictive dialler and the supervisor who set up the campaign in the software. Once the dialler manages to connect you to an operator it feeds a script to the operators terminal. Like a trained chimp, they will then sit there and read the script to you. If you ask anything that deviates from their script they won’t be able to help you. It might be about mobile phones, double glazing, insurance, new cars – anything.
Why bother with the operator at all I hear you ask. The only reason is because in India they are cheap at the moment so it’s cost effective. Prices of Asians are rising steadily as their standard of living is going up and their expectations of life start to match ours. In response pioneering call centres are already experimenting with totally automated cold calls where a computerised voice reads the script to you without any need for inefficient and costly human intervention.
In some ways I find this new development slightly less frustrating because at least
I know there’s no point in asking any questions and I don’t expect any help or understanding from a computerised voice. It also makes me feel less awkward about just hanging up, as I’m no longer forced to treat another human being rudely just to preserve my own dignity and privacy.
Just be grateful they haven’t found a way of automating the consumer – yet….
SanityFound
•14 years ago
Sorry have been hectic crazy busy trying to sort client out with urgent requests so individual comments with your original ones đŸ™‚
Visionary
•14 years ago
Sorry my reply did come across a bit serious didn’t it? I’m glad you’re here to make people laugh SF but my purpose is to rattle cages and wake people up and time is short.
I do have a sense of humour and I promise I laughed before I got carried away with my rant. Like most humour though, this article is based on a deeper feeling that we all share but might be able to articulate that there is something very wrong here.
As a former member of staff in the IT department at a Vodafone call centre, I have inside knowledge of the dehumanising technology behind these number crunching businesses and I wanted to share with people where the driving force towards treating people like this is coming from.
After my own personal financial collapse, I am still being chased by debt collecting call centre business that work on the same basis and use the same technology as telesales call centres. I get 2 or 3 calls a day from people working at companies that have bought my alleged debt from other companies and then get their computer to harass me constantly. It costs the company next to nothing in terms of time or money but it causes my family and I a great deal of stress and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. They won’t ever take me to court, which would be the decent thing to do because they know they wouldn’t win.
So when my kids answer the phone and somebody who doesn’t even know why they are doing it, asks my kids if thy can speak to daddy, then expect me to answer a series of security questions about my personal data that they are reading from a screen before they will even start harassing me properly, or if I have to explain to my kids why we just got another nuisance call during dinner with no one on the other end of the phone it doesn’t make me laugh any more.
The global economy is collapsing around our ears. This is may sound paranoid and stupid but the fact that we accept this kind of business practice as normal is all part of the reason why the house of cards that we call an economy is in its first stages of terminal collapse. I don’t call what these people do a job, I call it a soulless way of making money. In my eyes the two are very different.
A job should be something you do to provide service to people that rewards you with a sense of fulfilment and satisfaction. What satisfaction can there be from reading a script out over the phone 130 times a day to people who just want you to go away and the best you can hope for is that if you’re lucky they will too polite to say so.
SanityFound
•14 years ago
Visionary You are confusing me because one moment it feels as though you are defending them in that “job capacity” and then the next moment you are castigating the fact that their jobs are soulless and you don’t call it a job.
I understand you having the need to share the driving force behind it all and I understand you have a message you want to get out there but ultimately this post was a joke and should be taken as such – write a post and link back to it if you like and I’ll read what you have to say but right now you make little sense to me.
Visionary
•14 years ago
Sorry I vented here and spoiled the tone of your post, I think you hit one of my sensitive spots.
In explanation
I defend them as human beings deserving of respect, self expression and fulfillment, I castigate the job which allows them none of this.
The fact that I see it as a soulless job doesn’t mean I blame the people who are doing it. They are trying to make a living and support their families. I castigate the system which dehumanises both them and us by turning our human interaction into transactions.
I’ll keep the rants at my place in future.
Love V
SanityFound
•14 years ago
Not spoiled at all just saying that it seems you should write a post rather due to the fact that I am getting confused at what you are trying to get a cross.
deepsm25
•14 years ago
Funnnny Funnyy…have read them tooo in my inbox!!! Still got to check some 300 odd emails from sooo long….eeeks!