Saturday, July 07, 2007

Handling telemarketers

Telemarketers are getting more annoying, refusing to take "no" as your final answer. I am currently being hounded repeatedly by a finance company whose credit card I canceled. Instead of respecting and accepting my decision, they call at least once a week with pressure tactics to try and get me to re-activate my account. If you try to be nice, you waste several minutes on the phone. The only solution, it seems, is to rudely cut off the caller.

One effective option is to say that the person of interest is not currently at home. Do they have a message you could take? The guaranteed response: This is just a courtesy call, and they will try again later. Ask them which organization they represent, and see them squirm and wriggle as they look for a way to hide this info!

My most recent encounter was actually partially funny. The caller asked to speak to "Rachaman Balakardishna", a highly mangled version of my own name. I grabbed the quick-escape lifeline and declared that a person by that name did not live at our residence! The caller's interest flagged immediately, and I minimized my lost time.

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