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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

That's the entire point of sanitising your lists. When someone asks you to stop calling them you remove their number and stop calling them.

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You don't understand how salesmen work at all, and I'm not talking about them being shady, I'm just talking about general business practices.

Lists of names/numbers are for cold-calling, and yes, cold-calling should check any opt-outs first.

Once you are actually having conversations with a specific person about an actual sale, lists are no longer part of the equation. There's not a salesman in the world who, if asked by a customer to call them back (as happened in this case) would check a list before calling them back. It just wouldn't happen, ever. And frankly it shouldn't be expected to happen, the only time it would ever be useful to check a list is the very rare occurrence where the customer is trying to catch you out by telling you he's interested but he actually isn't.

The software that telemarketers use should make this automatic. You have a list of calls to make, during a call you can hit DNC which removes them from your any everyone else's queue. There's another button to add a call back at a future date. If the customer is on the DNC list it won't show up as a callback or will at least very clearly show that you shouldn't call them.

http://www.five9.com/call-center-software/features/do-not-ca...

> Five9 helps you comply with this legislation by letting you upload your company's supplemental Do Not Call list, which prevents these numbers from being dialed by your outbound and autodialer campaigns, and even manual calls placed by agents. In addition, you can automatically track requests for Do Not Call from inbound return calls, and enable agents to fulfill callers' requests to be placed on the Do Not Call list in real-time.

It's easy stuff if you're trying to be legit. There are a lot of companies that don't make that effort.

But once you get past cold calling and into actual back and forth, the conversations don't go through telesales lists or software. At that point you're no longer doing telesales, you're discussing options with a client, albeit a client who hss yet to make their first purchase.

Not in the situations I've seen, but perhaps this situation was different. I really doubt it though. Each "sales person" is in a cube with a headset on and an auto dialer either getting calls transferred (like in the OPs case after answering some questions) or making outbound calls from a pool or the call back / appt list. It's integrated with a CRM so that everyone can be tracked and the audio of the calls are recorded. The conversations are scripted and the agent reads what's on the screen while answering any questions with other prompts.

It's not like he got in touch with a sales guy who was going to take him to dinner. He just got to a human at a telemarketing company. They are just cogs in a larger machine.

If someone says 'don't call me', can't the salesperson then just delete their phone number?

He was waiting for a call back from one salesperson, and said "don't call me" to a different salesperson.

That doesn't matter in telemarketing. They're all working on the same autodialer and CRM.

They should. If the customer is no longer interested, and expressed it clearly by asking to be placed to DNC list, they should respect it. There's a lot of software out there that makes it as easy as clicking one button, or even easier - you open your CRM software and see big red "ASKED TO BE PLACED ON DNC" all over the record, and you know it didn't work out, time to move on. Of course, some salesmen may ignore that hoping they can persuade the client to reconsider, but then that's where $500 comes into play.

Didn't he state his preference was for him to call the salesman back and the salesman insisted he be the one to call?

That's semantics about what happens, doesn't change the overall situation. Reword to "the salesman said he would call back and the customer didn't ask him not to but instead said it was fine".

I think you are willing to give a lot of latitude to the sales person here. I think it is true that it is human psychology to trust a relationship that is established, but we would prefer a world where rules still have to apply, no matter what. Right?

It is so much better if this incident sets a standard for their company and the telemarketers are forced to validate each time irrespective of their past association with the callers.

I don't think I am giving him latitude, if your job was selling to people and a customer had expressed interest in your product and had agreed to wait for you to call back would you in a million years stop to think "maybe he was lying to me, when he said he wanted to call me another type he wasn't telling the truth, I'd better check the database to see if he doesn't want me to call"?

Other than random, unexpected cases of people trying to trick you, any customer in the world would, if they changed their mind about being interested, wait for the call back and say it then, not contact someone else at the company to be put on a do not call list.

What you are saying is correct, in that what happened in this case was kinda gamed to mislead. One reason where I think the calling company stepped the line was, someone else calling him back when he did not return their call.

I would hope that companies do more due diligence when a customer is not calling back. Maybe the customer changed their minds. The problem with telemarketers is that they don't care about what customers are thinking and so someone else went ahead and called him.

What I would prefer is (and this is where I think I don't want to give any inch of room for the sales person) is that they constantly have to be aware of what the customer's latest situation is. I would prefer all telemarketers get trained this way and not intrude. Don't you think this is better?

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