Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Telemarkers at Work

I work in the reservations department at a conferencing center and we receive calls from telemarketers all the time.  I hate these calls...  I'm not a receptionist.  I'm not an operator.  I schedule your conference calls.  I feel like telling these people that they've dialed the wrong number!  Someone mentioned yesterday that there should be an option to speak with the receptionist although I suppose then the receptionist would get a lot of people that really want to schedule a conference.

Anywho..  This one guy calls in today & was so vague about all of the information he gave me that it was all I could do to keep from laughing in his ear.

Caller:  "Hi.  This is Mike.  Is Greg Doerr there?"
Me:  "May I ask what this is in regards to?"
Caller:  "Yeah..  I'm just following up with him."
Me:  "Okay..  What's the name of your company?"
Caller:  "My VRM."
Me:  "So to confirm, you've spoken with him before and would like to follow up with him about what?"
Caller:  "Um..  We're a vendor."
Me:  "..."
Caller:  "We were talking about solutions."

What the hell?!  So he's Mike calling from VRM (which doesn't tell me anything about the company) and he's a "vendor" (of what exactly, I'm not sure) "following up" (he avoided my question pretty well as far as if he's spoken with Greg before) with the CEO of our company (who doesn't really speak with vendors as far as I know) following up on "solutions" (again, of what?  What kind of solutions?).  Greg doesn't answer his phone anyway so I put him into voice mail.

There was also someone who called in today and handled it completly differently.

Caller:  "Hello!  My name is Todd Banks and I'm with a company called Paragon Micro.  We're an IT reseller company.  Can you direct me to someone who can help me?"
Me:  "Why sure Todd!  It will be just a moment while I verify who that person is."  "Thank you for holding.  I'm going to transfer you to David."
Caller:  "Ok..  Let me write that down..  Do you have his last name?"

Blah, blah, blah...

So, which guy do you think I respected more and wanted to help?  Yup.  That's right!  The guy who was up front and provided me with information.

So here's to you, telemarketers doing business to business calls, give up the info!  Have confidence!  We'll provide you with as much as we can if you can do the same.  It's all about Mutual Respect (GO BHS!!).


Creative Commons License
I Just Want to Be Ok by Sarah A. Manning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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