Grumpy Old Man – Telephone Canvassing

You know the routine.

You’re just sitting down to your evening meal when the phone rings.

Its in another room so you put your plate down, try and halt the slavering so that you don’t sound like Hannibal Lecter on the phone, and dash to grab the handset before its cuts to the answer machine.

“Hello” a voice says.

There is a pause, so you say “Hello” back, wondering who the hell this is.

“Are you looking for a loan, do you have a bad credit rating, CCJ’s, are you a bankrupt, a former director of a PLC bank, do you consider suicide more than three times a day, well worry no more, WankerLoans can help…”

…and you hang up on the talking computer.

How irritating are they, more importantly how irritating are they when they ring at exactly 6.10pm every single frikkin night of the week and how irritating is it that you dash to the phone like Pavlovs Dog knowing full well that its the talking computer again with its recorded message of doom ?

Yes, yes, yes, I know all about the TPS and their magical list of “Do not call these numbers”, we seem to be unlisted again since we swapped back to BT and frankly I can’t be arsed re-listing, anyway, who else would I talk to if not the talking computer o’doom.

Does anyone actually stand in the hallway with the phone pressed to their ear and listen to more than ten seconds of these poorly pitched recorded sales messages ? Has anyone ever pressed the hash key and booked a further sales call with a real human in order to obtain very expensive credit, or to replace their uPVC windows with more uPVC windows – do double glazing companies really think that they can convince people to replace their existing uPVC windows with another set of  uPVC windows when they bought the first set of uPVC windows on a promise that “they will last a lifetime love”.

Has any finance company ever sold a loan to a man who was just about to tuck into a nice pork chop, some chips and a token vegetable followed by appple crumble and custard, only to find that the recorded message of financial salvation was far more preferable to his excellent meal of choice ?

How the hell do the purveyors of these machines of extreme irritation pitch the sale to double glazing and finance companies ? Probably by a recorded message call first…

“Hello”
“Good Morning, Extremely Optimistic Double Glazing Corp, Maureen speaking…”
“Hello, I’m here to tell you all about a wonderful new marketing tool, The Extremely Irritating Recorded Message At Mealtimes Corporation can boost your sales pitches by, erm, sometimes…”

How many phone calls does The Extremely Irritating Recorded Message at Mealtimes machine have to make before it hits the one sucker in the UK who was just about to tuck into his pork chop, chips and random vegetable when a flash of inspiration crosses his mind to change his fairly new uPVC windows with some brand new uPVC windows next week, just at the same moment as the Extremely Irritating Recorded Message at Mealtimes machine rings him ?

You try selling one of those Extremely Irritating Recorded Message at Mealtimes machines to a double glazing company chairman, christ you’d have to be a good salesman.

.

Jerry Springers Afterthought…

I’ve just remembered, the Telephone Preference Service, or more accurately the Fax Preference Service, an organisation designed specifically to allow businesses to register their fax lines so that they don’t recieve unsolicited fax marketing campaigns – sounds like a good idea yes ?

Let me tell you this story then – we had a customer, I won’t name them, they are a charity, a big national charity, they provide famine relief to poor starving orphans in Africa, they started in Oxford many years ago, called themselves Oxford Famine or something, anyway they are not called that now so I can give you that information, I’m not telling you their real name though ok ?

So as with all our customers we like to offer them discounts throughout the year and as with all our customers we ask them for their contact details when they first become customers, part of which is their fax number, by giving us their fax number we assume that they don’t mind us faxing them stuff, if they did mind us faxing them stuff then they shouldn’t give us their frikkin fax number, in fact if they don’t like receiving any faxes at all then they shouldn’t have bought a frikkin fax machine should they ?

So we sent them a marketing fax offering them 50% discount off their next purchase from us, not randomly sent, we checked the frequency of their purchases with us before we sent it, we knew that they were ready to purchase some more supplies, so we offered them a big discount, aren’t we kind ?

The fekkwit who runs the operation at their Huddersfield depot (oops, that might be too much information) complained to the Fax Preference Service that we were faxing them when they’d listed themselves with the FPS – we got a stroppy letter from the FPS asking us what the hell we thought we were doing sending a fax to one of their members and did we know that they could jail us all for ten or more years for the crime of sending faxes to one of their members, they got very stroppy then and demanded to know where we had bought the fax number from and why hadn’t we checked it against their self important list of barred numbers ?

I wrote back and thanked them very sweetly for their concern, my explanation went something along the lines of “…we obtained Mr xxxx’s fax number from Mr xxxxx himself, he is a client of ours, he voluntarily gave us his fax number so that we could fax things to him, but if he is stupid enough not to recognise that we are trying to save him money on the purchase of his next box of supplies then so be it, we won’t send him anymore”, the FPS did not reply.

The Huddersfield branch of the famine relief company who were at some point founded in Oxford rang us about a month later to order some supplies, just as predicted by our excellent Purchasing Prediction Machine (me).

“Can we have a big box of your expensive supplies again please ?” the complaining idiot of a manager asked
“Yes of course ” I replied with glee, “that will be a lot of money please”
“Ooh thats a lot of money” the complaining idiot of a manager replied, “don’t we get a discount ?”
“Yes you do” I replied, “the details are on the fax that we sent out about a month ago, you can get 50% off if you just quote me the reference”
“Oh” said the complaining idiot
“Right” I replied “so thats a lot of money then, do you have your credit card details ?”

I smiled a lot that day.

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