Tele Marketing

Hi there Grandpa, Most Americans echo the same complaint as you. It's not that we mind helping their countries out at all but it's all about big corp. greed. It is only the big corps that are saving and they sure are not passing those savings on to consumers at all. They are paying these workers a small fraction of what they would have to pay an American worker. Basically, they are using them. It isn't just the call centers but so many of our products and parts are outsourced now and jobs here are so hard to come by. And the quality on many things is questionable at best. Not only that, it keeps these people dependent on us when they should be looking to be independent in their own country. It just is wrong. The telemarketers...so annoying. I ignore them. I have caller ID and if I don't recognize the number, I let my answering machine pick up.

"several unsolicited phone calls every week" I got home about two hours ago. It is afternoon here and I have had four since I arrived! All of them were promoting one phone company or another and they had all phoned in the last ten days with the same propositions! I have to answer the phone regardless of whether I recognise the number or not right now as I am expecting some calls from offices in the next few days. Sadly those calls are not arriving bu the promoters are getting through. I politely tell them that a colleague of theirs phoned a few days ago and that I am not interested in whatever it is that they are offering. I am well aware that they are trying to do a job to buy their daily bread and I try to be as polite as I can - and while it is dayti,e I usually manage it. When they call after dusk, that gets me mad and I point out that they are invading my privacy as it is no longer the 'working' day for most of us. Still I refrain from slamming down the phone, even though I'm tempted to.

I would like to share a thing about telemarketing/telesales thingy and how you can handle these calls.First of outsourcing is not as bad as it may seem.Many outsourcing managers/owners turn their backs on some countries to place their company and give people a decent job.They do it because they believe in the talent of Asian people in business and in selling by the use of a telephone.Sure enough there are times that customers of these call centers may experience gaps in their language or in their accent simply because they came from a different country and even if they may sound American,Australian,British,Spanish,Chinese etc. still the accent of their native language will still be heard.But don't under estimate telemarketers or telesales agents they were trained hard in doing this job. I can say so because I was a telesales representative., and I am proud to be a Filipino who happen to have served and sold items using my previous company's means and their training.If you don't want to be disturbed by these telemarketers the best way to handle it is to let them finish their talking and honestly tell them you are not interested in buying from them.These telemarketers/telesales agents were trained to impress the customer in buying products from them and the only barrier is that if the customer does not like to buy then that is known to the telemarketer and they will hang up the phone and will bid you goodbye.And from a telesales agent point of view too we were so nervous at placing calls to persons we hardly know and offer them products it's hard being a telemarketer or a telesales representative.Its just that we are only doing the job that we are trained in and that we are introducing a more efficient and convenient way of buying products at the comfort of your homes.Outsourcing business is rapidly growing here in my country and I use to work for one.And as far as I have dealt with some foreign customers,some were good and polite some were irate, some were very demanding to the extent that if their favors are not obeyed they will get angry and cuss the agent it happened to me but it was okay. :)

G'day Lash. Good to see you here once more. I thought that you had disappeared, most likely it was because I have not been here much in recent months. Yes the dreaded telemarketer. What about the fact that they always seem to call you up when you are in the middle of preparing dinner or eating? Or just settling into a relaxing evening! Where is their logic? We ended up changing our home number and then getting a private number just to avoid them. And then we still got the odd one every now and then. I even get them on my mobile phone too from time to time. We just returned from a trip to the USA where we rented a mobile phone for the duration of our visit. We did this so that we could keep in touch with emails from our staff member running our business at home, plus so that we could be contacted by people we were meeting over there. We got free internet access with the phone but we had to pay 60 cents per minute for outgoing as well as incoming calls! Yep! We had to pay for incoming calls! Which was pretty annoying seeing as most of the incoming calls we got were from telemarketers spamming us with their recorded messages or were in heavy Mexican accents that we could not understand! Some were even in Spanish so we had absolutely no hope of understanding them! When I returned the phone at the airport I went through the list of calls and got him to note all the calls that were telemarketers but it seems like we still ended up paying for them once we got the final bill. Last time I use that service! I am far from racist too, but when I want service from my provider and call them up, the last thing I want is to waste my time attempting to understand what an Indian is saying to me on the phone. I began requesting Australian people to talk to when I ring them up and they always put me through which works well. Of course, this is different to when telemarketers ring us up though!

Generally, I screen my calls and do not answer unless I know who is calling. If I do happen to answer the phone for a telemarketer, though, then I will politely tell him or her that I am not interested ... I usually have to interrupt his or her practiced speech to do this as I am not interested in listening to the entire thing before declining. If he or she pushes the issue, then I will again politely say that I am not interested and hang up the phone, even if they are in the midst of speaking.

It does rather bother me even more when it is some absurd time during the day. Obviously, no matter what time of the day, in case something happened to an older family member, I rather need to answer the phone. And then on the other end, there is rather someone trying to sell me something that I am not going to have no interest. At an early time, I might be inclined to play along for a little bit but in this day and age, I just feel inclined to hang up and not spare the feelings of anyone. And yes, sadly a lot of people are going to be out of work. But obviously when you have a business and you are looking for labor that is just much cheaper, than the answer is going to be obvious. Time to outsource. It puts people out of work but it makes a disturbing amount of business sense. I always hang up though. Don't have the time or the patience any more.

Personally I have always wondered why companies especially like Dell just use so many foreign countries for the people who handle their Customer service? In reality, especially with the Economy being the way it is, I would think they would want to hire more people who you could understand. I guess they never Stop and think about this and just try to shave a few dollars so their profit margins are even higher. But it is True when there are places calling you for information, or telling you you have submitted some information and they are calling to see how interested you really are, how come most places never want to take NO for an answer, or sometimes you cannot even understand them to where you have to worry about what they really were trying to say. Aren't there easier ways to gain a Customer and do their business?

I don't like it either. I think that when we are at home that our phines shouldn't ring unless it is family or friends. I get especially irritated when it is one of those Saturday mornings that I actually have off from work and at 8am the phone starts ringing. There was one I got a couple of times that had a fog horn that would blow in your ear first thing announcing that I had won a cruise..LOL. I also understand that people are trying to make a living but that doesn't make a Saturday morning fog horn any more pleasant. I usually screen my calls or turn the phone off altogether.

here in my country; the Philippines; we also have call centers who cater to our local market so i too have experienced receiving this annoying phone calls. i usually politely explain that i don't have the need for the product the telemarketer is selling. i once worked for a call center as a survey interviewer for a well known call center here in my country so i know how it feels to be in their shoes.

Hi grandpa_lash! We also experience those things in our country, most of the time at the office. Especially the credit card companies who would like to promote additional offers. Sometimes it is really annoying most especially if I am rushing some reports or doing some important matters. But nevertheless, I would politely tell the caller that I am not interested or I would call back later during my free time. I understand that is also part of their job.