Why is it that Dave from Duct Cleaning decided to call me, not once but twice, right in the middle of when I was making dinner for my husband and 2 kids? And why does Dave call me “the home owner” rather than Shari, which is my name? I’ll tell you why….it’s because Dave doesn’t care about me. And neither does his employer, Duct Cleaning. If Dave really cared about me, THE CONSUMER , he wouldn’t be calling me at dinner time and he wouldn’t be calling me “the home owner”.

In all fairness to Dave, he’s just doing his job. But, he’s not doing it well. And that’s the problem with telemarketers in general. I blame that on the companies who these people represent. The companies don’t train their staff very well in the art of customer service.  In fact, I doubt they train them at all. I score them a big ZERO on the customer happiness scale.  Not a great way to get sales in my opinion.

In all the years that telemarketing has been legal, (and I really wish it wasn’t) I have only ever encountered a handful of callers who actually cared about me enough to at least acknowledge that dinner time wasn’t the best time to be calling and could they call me back at a more convenient time. But not Dave. No, Dave continued his spiel even though I told him that I was making dinner. Dave made me hang up on him.  Not a great way to forge a long lasting customer relationship Dave.

So much for the Do Not Call List in Canada because it really is a joke.  I get that telemarketing companies are in business to make money. But there are better ways to market a business.  How about investing some of your hard earned cash in some honest to goodness inbound marketing. You know, the kind that doesn’t infringe on people’s privacy? The kind that lets me, the consumer, decide when to buy your products and services. I bet you’ll make A LOT more sales that way.

So guess what’s going to happen the next time I need my ducts cleaned? (that kinda sounds disgusting but lets not go there right now)  I won’t be calling Duct Cleaning and Dave won’t be making any commission off me! See how well telemarketing works.

To the telemarketers of the world, let me just say this: stop it. Stop it right now. Give me back my dinner hour with my family. Stop taking it from us. It’s not yours and you can’t have it. If you really want my money then you’re going about it the wrong way.

Tags: Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.