May 21, 2007
Don't call me
Yippee!!
Friday I received an email that we have been added to the Don't Call Register. God I hope this works! We did get a silent number when we moved to this house, specifically to address the volume of nuisance calls we were getting from call centres but that has only been partially sucessful.
You see when offered the choice of a new phone number (800 xxxxxx) or an old phone number, (9378 xxxxxx) I fell for the romance of the old one, nostalgic for the days when the prefix in someone's number told you what suburb they lived in. This was a fatal mistake as while our number is now silent it obviosuly wasn't before and there are enough places using older versions of the database for it still to appear on their lists. We have even had a couple of calls from centres who were obviously aware that the number was now silent but were pretending ignorance and 'fishing' in the hope that we would initiate an enquiry that would get them off the hook and allow them to pursue their normal speel with us.
I mean get this;
"Hello, I'm ringing on behalf of Telstra to check whether you are still listed as using Telstra services". To which I responded that I was quite sure Telstra knew whether or not we were using their services and maybe he should ask them.
The Indian centres seem to be the ones that get everyone riled up and I have to say that in terms of sheer volume of calls they are the worst. Their habit of putting YOU on hold is also mind-bogglingly-irritating. What marketing guru came up with that brilliant idea? Hey, we're going to call people when they don't want us to and annoy the hell out of them and just to warm them up a bit we'll first put them on hold and they can wait for us! What amazes me is that people do wait!
But by far the most annoying operators to deal with are those gung-ho aussie boys. Sooooooo facetious, patronising, upbeat and downright ignorant in one package is just plain alarming. No wonder they're working in a call centre.
And damn, the chooks still aren't laying!
Posted by Faith