|
I've been on both sides of the situation. I worked for almost 3 years in a call center for the University I attended, calling alumni for donations for scholarships. Now when my phone rings incessantly, I just consider that payback and turn the ringer off. Simple as that. But as a caller, I've been on the receiving end of just about everything. The single most effective way to make me never call you again? Tell me the person was deceased. I had a person once inform me that Mr So-and-so had just passed away last week. When I mumbled something along the lines of I'm so sorry, he asked me where I was calling from so I told him. His response? 'Oh.. I thought you were trying to sell me something! If you're calling from USC.. I'm not dead!!! ' He proceeded to make a fairly hefty donation that day even though he admitted that I HAD caught him during dinner.
I've had people pass their phone onto their babbling 3 year old. So I'd start chatting with the kid. When the parent realized I was actually taking the time to talk to the kid instead of hanging up, they came back on and I'd say no, give me back the kid.. we were having fun! I've had people ask me for my home number so they can call me during my dinner - I'd laugh and say that wouldn't do them any good.. I was at work during dinner time, but my break was in 15 minutes.. here's my work number, I'd be happy to talk to them during my break if they wanted to make a donation. I had one person take me up on that offer and end up making a small donation as a result because I took time during my dinner break to talk to them.
My most memorable call was the guy that my boss had pulled from the computer system and told me to call manually since he didn't want one of the less experienced callers bungling up the call as the guy was a big donor. I chased him for about 2 months, calling twice a week - and getting quite friendly with his wife in that time. The guy was a cardiac surgeon or some such thing so she never knew when he'd be home but she would suggest times to try calling and I'd follow up then. I finally got him at home one evening, and he put me on hold and passed the phone to someone. Turns out the president of my university was over for dinner that evening while they discussed a sizeable donation and he was so amused by being tackled from both sides that he passed the phone over to the pres for a minute. When I got him back on the phone I not only got him to agree to a donation to our department once again that year but asked him to consider doubling it to $20,000. He laughed and said it took some guts for me to do that.. nobody else had dared to ask him to up his donation in all the years that we'd been calling him, but because I had the guts to do so, he would.
Sure, there were also the people who cursed me out, called me every filthy name in th book, blew whistles into my ear and many other things. The attitude at my call center was that if the person on the other end is such a miserable person that they felt the need to resort to such measures when their alma mater called them, they must be pretty unhappy people, and we wouldn't let our lives be affected by them. Any person who was excessively rude was put on our inhouse do-not-call list so the callers wouldn't be subjected to them again either. There's no point in our calling someone who doesn't want to talk to us. But for the most part people realized we were a bunch of college students just trying to earn a living and were fairly pleasant to us. I actually enjoyed the job a great deal and if I could earn a decent living from it now, I wouldn't mind doing it again!
On the flip side, when I get repeated calls form telemarketers - as long as they're polite I am just as polite to them while telling them I am not interested, or informing them that I have passed away. (Oh it was such a tragedy!) It's when they start calling me repeatedly that I start pulling pranks on them. There is no reason that I need to be called 3 times a day for 3 weeks straight to be offered a payday loan. UGH. Those robocalls however make me very very cranky.
|