Islay McLeod’s Scotland
Waterloo, Perthshire, where I have been this week, is a dry village so if you want a drink you have to go to the Bankfoot Inn nearby, where mine hostess Susan will be happy to serve you
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Who wants to know?
Jill Stephenson
When is a sales call not a sales call? Those of us who registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) to try to put an end to unsolicited calls from firms trying to sell double-glazing or fitted kitchens now find that there has been a relatively recent surge in what is politely called ‘cold calling’ (not that recipients are polite about it).
Apparently, the TPS covers sales calls. But many firms have adopted another tactic to get round that. Either they are engaged in research, they say, asking, for example, which of four home improvements will be one’s ‘next project’ – I had such a call recently. I have to say that asking such a question is not my idea of research. Then they can try to sell you the home improvement that is your ‘next project’ (new kitchen, new bathroom, new windows, e.g.). Or else they appear to offer a service.
I am spurred to write this by yet another caller from India (apparently) wanting to advise me about the kind of problems that one may encounter with a PC. He admitted that, while he could discuss computer problems with me, his company would charge me if I required actual advice or help. I call that a sales call.
There are various ways of dealing with this kind of thing – apart from asking the caller to wait a minute and then leaving the phone hanging indefinitely. I recall a former neighbour telling me that he engaged in a long discussion with a conservatory company and then, when the question was asked about whether he was going to buy a conservatory, said ‘Oh, I can’t do that. I live in a second floor flat’ (which he didn’t). Someone whose comment I have seen in The Word online says: Sometimes I use I’m glad you called. Have you found Jesus yet?.
My normal response when someone calls and asks ‘Mrs Stephenson?’ is to say ‘Who wants to know?’. This sometimes throws them. More recently, the line has simply gone dead. Job done – although I have still have had to interrupt what I was doing in order to answer the phone. Of course, there are also times when I ask this and the person at the other end is someone I actually want to hear from; apologies are then in order, as was particularly the case with the woman who rang to tell me that one of my colleagues, her father, had died.
With the (repeated) cold call offering me advice about PC problems, I have two replies. One is: ‘What makes you think I have a computer?’. This stupefies the caller – surely everyone has a computer? The other reply is similar but different: ‘I do not have a PC’. This is true. I use an Apple Mac. I am writing this after a day when I had one such call in the morning and another at 7pm, when I was up to my elbows in food preparation. The ‘Windows Service Centre’ representative, somewhere in India, was perplexed when, in a rage, I kept asking why he thought I had a computer. Apparently, they dial numbers at random. Twice in one day does not feel random.
Do the companies that inflict this on us not have any idea of how counterproductive it is? Or are there people out there who are daft enough to give cold callers a sale? It seems that there are, since cold calling is big business. There are even businesses who advise about the most effective ways of doing it.
According to a Which? survey in August 2010, three-quarters of those asked said that they would like cold calling to be completely banned. Yes! The business department, within whose remit marketing falls, is, however, of the view that there is a balance to be struck ‘between allowing legitimate businesses to continue to operate and the needs of consumers’. This consumer’s need is for a quiet life, undisturbed by unsolicited phone calls.
The TPS works, up to a point. It does not prevent ‘research’ calls or those that purport to be offering assistance. It seems not to prevent calls from beyond the range of one’s local telephone directory. People from Fife or the west of Scotland ring up and, when I say that I’m registered with the TPS, they say that they have no indication of that. And, of course, the calls from abroad can’t be controlled.
There are various firms that claim to be more effective than the TPS, but there are also warnings to the effect that they are not – and they charge.
Online marketing guru Daljeet Sidhu tells us: ‘In spite of the legal regulations governing calls by the telemarketing industry, cold calling is still one of the best ways of generating sales leads and making a sale. It is unreasonable to assume your office will be inundated by customers unless you go after them to make the sale. By using cold calling effectively, you can attract more customers and expand your business’.
It turns out that, while B2C calls cause a great many of us inconvenience at the very least (and some people feel intimidated by them), the real prize for cold callers is the B2B traffic. No, I didn’t know what these letter/number codes meant, either. My deduction is that they are ‘business to customer’ and ‘business to business’, respectively. So, if you think you are unreasonably assailed by B2C cold calls (as I do), spare a thought for the companies that are constantly on the receiving end of the B2Bs.
Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh