Everyone hates telemarketers, and who can blame them? They call during dinner, at nine o’clock at night, and even after you have screamed into the phone before slamming it down.
How do I know?
I am truly ashamed to admit this; I might even have to change user names to avoid the ugly glares across the Internet. Yes, I can feel them already. But during a financial rut I was in once I became a market researcher AKA telemarketer. We all have those moments when we just have to eat and pay the rent. I started to do music surveys from four to eleven PM. While I was doing this I realized that most people don’t know how to keep them from calling. And because every time I called someone at dinner I wanted to apologize but couldn’t I have decided to tell everyone how to make them go away
Who is calling you?
The first thing you should do is quit screaming at the person calling you. Their presence doesn’t cause or stop the calls to your house. During my brief stint in one of those places I realized that half of the employees have some kind of health problem that keep them out of work where you have to stand. At least twenty five percent of them were in wheel chairs. If you don’t have a degree and you are in a wheel chair you don’t have many options. Another twenty five percent were college students or parents going back to college and couldn’t find anything else that worked with their schedule. Many were rotating people, people who took the job just long enough to feed their kids while they find something better.
How to make it stop.
The second thing you should know is that screaming into the phone and hanging up will not actually get your name and number taken off the list. The agents in most call centers are not allowed to remove a number unless you plainly and specifically ask them to do it. If you just hang up they have to schedule a call back, if you say that the person they called for isn’t there they will still have to schedule a call back. The best way to get it to stop is for you to tell them to take your name off the list. Ninety nine percent of the time that will stop it. If you get a second call for some reason; do not yell at the agent calling you, they did not dig your number up on purpose to bother you, it just popped up on the screen. Ask to talk to a supervisor and say, “Stop calling me or I will sue you.” This will get your number not only removed but also on a watch list to make sure that it never comes up again. Sue is the magic word.
Last resort.
If you claim that the person being called for is dead that number will be deleted. If you happen to just enjoy hanging up on telemarketers please do it loudly so they know and don’t keep reading the script.
Just one more thing to remember, the Do Not Call list will only prevent sales calls from being made to you. Anyone with a survey or announcement is not violating that rule.
