People who claimed to be from Octopus called my mobile a few times over the last couple of weeks. For the first two times the chick was reading from a long script which obviously wasn’t getting to the point after 15 seconds. When I interrupted she refused to tell me what she wanted, but insist that I should spend a few minutes listening to what she had to say, which I refused due to lack of patience for unsolicited sales pitch. The third time a guy (someone more senior?) called and told me that the chick won’t be calling again, and apologized for wasting my time(!), but he also wanted to know whether I could spend 2 minutes to listen to what he had to say. I asked him to tell me what exactly he wanted in a couple of sentences. It turned out to be some sort of loss card protection. I asked whether it cost any money. He replied that it would be very inexpensive. I said thank you and hung up.
Unsolicited phone call marketing has to be absolutely the worse marketing method. It is demoralizing for the staff, wasting precious time of and pissing off your potential customers. I have no doubt that there are people out there who have money burning in their pocket to be spent and they are dying to speak to another human being trying to give them information on goods and services, but unsolicited phone call is not the way to look for these people.
The Lady OTOH is just too nice to say no. ABN kept bugging her to take out a personal loan, where she wouldn’t have to pay interest or penalty if she pays it back within three months. No application form needed, and all she needed to do was to fax them her ID and a bank statement or something. The Lady kept telling them that she didn’t need a loan, but the staff who kept calling just wouldn’t give up, telling her that she could apply for the loan “just in case”. The Lady somehow got the impression that if she didn’t actually draw out the loan she needs not do or pay anything, and she would be doing the staff a favour by contributing to her quota, so she complied.
Turned out that ABN would be depositing HK$60K into her account, and charge her a HK$300 “membership fee”. The Lady was not happy that she would have to go into the trouble of writing a cheque to pay back the loan (and remembering to do it!), and paying for a service she doesn’t need or use, so she rejected them immediately. A complete waste of time for all parties involved.
Noone (except farmers) wants to buy sh*t. So we marketing sh*t to the masses to death. Makes a whole lot of sense.
1 response so far ↓
1 James // Feb 6, 2005 at 10:08 am
I don’t want to piss these telesales off either though. Who knows what information they have on us. However, I have since made a habit of telling them I don’t make any such kind of decisions on the phone, and if they have something to send me, I’ll look them over. They would not bother to send you anything, so whether they have my address already or not, I’d never have repeat them. Some of them would be kind enough to say they would jot down my wish for them not to call again, some bitches would just slam the phone.
When I was selling computers in Canada, my boss asked me to cold call at least 20 phones a day. I told him to shove it. We were in the business of selling computers, not to piss people off.