Dealing with tele-pests

SO, I got some lovely responses to my call for ways to deal with telemarketers.

READ: Telemarketing trials

Raymond tries to keep the person on the phone for as long as possible by saying he’s not the right person to speak to, and passing the phone round the office – their record, he says, is seven minutes. Or he tells them he’s in a call centre and has to take calls, then puts the phone down, repeatedly. Every time he picks it up, he asks the caller to repeat what they said. “I enjoy this technique the most – it is so funny – some people will repeat themselves umpteen times, and not even realise they are being pranked…”

Norman had some measured advice to offer on all direct marketing:

Firstly, do not give them permission to phone or contact you. Yes, believe it or not, by law you need to give people written permission to contact you for direct marketing. The way companies obtain this permission is by tricking you when you complete forms or apply for services. On almost all application forms there will be an option where you must tick a block to get “notified” of special offers. It will look something like this:

YES! Please keep me informed of special offers in future.  
Or:
Xxxx and any of its accredited service providers may contact me for communication/marketing purposes   
   
The wording might differ but the idea stays the same. If you tick it, you gave them permission to share your personal information with whomever they want.

Aargh! Norman, it’s too late! Didn’t you tick that box on the form at the garage? You know, the form you filled in on your way to the coast on holiday, when your guard was down, and they were offering an Xbox as a prize?

Or the one that you filled in in a tearing hurry when your bag was snatched and you were trying to replace all your cards?

Norman, I am an old hand at this. After an initial bout of wasteful ticking years ago, I realised my foolishness, and now I have the most repressed mouse in the business. Except… the other day, I started filling in a form. It was pages and pages of answers, but the prize was a car, and you’ve no idea how much I need a car, Norman. 

My husband’s French wench went sick a while back, and you know how much those French jobbies cost to fix, right? Like ten times as much as my old Japanese lady. And they have to send all the way to Paris for parts – and the Parisian parts suppliers are away for the summer, so it takes the best part of the year to find out that the part they’ve rustled up somewhere in the shadier parts of the City of Lights is the wrong part…

But I have a car, so all is copacetic. I don’t think. Two working people need two working cars, so I really, really, really wanted that car, you geddit?

I was ticking and clicking through the endless questionnaire, making up answers as I thought appropriate, until I realised, as I clicked on ‘next’, that I’d just filled in my ID number. My actual ID number! Am I completely bananas, batty, crackers, cuckoo, loony, nuts, unbalanced, wacky?

And I couldn’t reverse it, couldn’t go back. Spitting fury at the screen didn’t help. And then, on the very next page, in tiny font, they’d written: Please note that you do not have to complete all the questions to be eligible for the prize.

Porca miseria! Tabernacle! (Did you know that this is a fearsome swear word in Quebec? The ‘le’ is silent, as in… well, as in ‘tabernacle’.)

So yes, Norman, “most of us have completed forms in the past and probably ticked the box. By law direct marketers must give you the option to ‘opt out’ if you are not interested. If they don’t, they are breaking the law and can lose their licence to do direct marking.

It is also a good idea to ask them where they got your details from. Sometimes they will tell you and you can take it up with the company directly, but I found that mostly they will not disclose that piece of information. If they tell you they got it from a ‘national centralised database’ or something like that, they are lying. There is no such thing legally.

“Thirdly, all direct marketing companies in South Africa must be members of the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa. On the DMA’s website there is a link to the DO NOT CONTACT ME LIST (National Opt Out) list. Register yourself on this list. If you register yourself on this list and they still phone you, you can lodge a complaint with the DMA and they will investigate it. Recently the MD of a direct marketing company phoned me personally and apologised after I reported them.”

This is a very good point, folks – I suggest we all do it, in massive numbers. Maybe that will finally get companies to understand how hated direct marketing is.   

“You can also ask the Post Office to disallow marketing flyers being placed in your postal box.”

The last laugh, Norman? Anything in my post box would be a sign of life – I just got my bank statement for August!

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.