[LINK] telemarketers, aaarrgh

[Adam Todd]

At 09:55 31/10/01 +1100, Danny Yee wrote:
>I was just woken up by a bloody telemarketer.  I've been getting
>more telemarketing calls than usual over the last month, but I'm not
>sure if that's because I've been by myself (the other members of my
>household are on holidays) or because they're trying to fit extra
>stuff in before December 21.

Is there any chance your phone is an Optus service, or you have the account 
with Optus?

If the answer is yes, then you can expect several calls a day.  Optus 
happily and freely sells it's client base to ANYONE who will pay 
money.  Toyota, Real Estate Agents, Boystown, Telemarketers doing Charity 
calls (I'd NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS give a credit card number to a 
marketing person collecting for a charity!!) gosh who else have we seen the 
last few months ...

>Is there some kind of "web page of shame" where we can list
>organisations that use telemarketing and boycott them all?

No, but if you want, I'd be happy to create a database system (only take a 
couple of hours) and give it a nice inoz.com URL.

I have to admit, on one of the Optus lines that comes into the office, we 
get about 10-18 calls a day.  Thats' volunteer staff time answering the 
phones (and they ring enough as it is) being asked for a person who is 
never in the office anyway, being told they aren't available, then an 
attempt to onsell to whoever answers the phone.  Average call we've managed 
to get down to about 45 seconds politely, but I've not told staff, when the 
calls come IN on the optus line, unless the call management system 
indicates who the call is from, or if they are asked for the name of the 
account holder just hang up FAST.

If we're rude enough times, maybe they'll take the numbers off the 
list.  Maybe not.

They all use ISDN, so calls under 2 minutes are actually cheaper than local 
calls for PSTN.  <sigh>  Most operate on a time charged call rate so it's 
11cents plus seconds.  They are carefully scripted to meet the max call 
charge of a local call.

If you REALLY want to piss the companies off, try and keep their staff on 
the phone for a REALLY LONG TIME!!  I once put my headset on and talked 
REALLY slowly (and I mean REALLY SLOWLY) for 20 minutes doing some survey 
picking random answers.  I was writing email at the time so it wasn't using 
a lot of brain power to ask them to repeat the last question and 
options.  They operator started to get really irate and say this was the 
longest response they ever had.  Started to tell me I couldn't do the 
survey so I asked for their name and supervisors contact details so I could 
complain that I wasn't being treated with respect, they continued :)

I hope that REALLY stuffed the operators "pay per call" rate and cost the 
company a fortune!