By Denise Wong
TELEMARKETER CALLING
We’ve all gotten unwelcome calls from telemarketers, even cursed them or hung up on them. “About 30 per cent would just hang up [on me],” confirms Dana, who used to work as a telemarketer. “Reading that script over and over all day made you sound like a recording after a while. I . . . had one man get angry and say that we’re robots.”
Last winter, I was on the receiving end of a negative telemarketer experience: a telemarketer called me, telling me about a new telephone add-on service, which I politely declined. I expected the conversation to end there, but this guy was persistent. After several painful minutes of varying my refusal, he switched gears and asked me: “So what’s your name?” Despite being no expert on the telemarketing business, the question was unsettling. A complete stranger (who, for all I know, may not even be a real telemarketer) had access to my phone number and now wanted to know my name? Call me paranoid, but a voice in my head was screaming “stranger danger.” Since I was in no mood for conflict, I politely told him that I did not think it was necessary to disclose that information if I had no interest in his offer. He told me that my “nice voice” had sparked his curiosity. That got me thinking: what is the point of telemarketers, and could our society do without them?
THE FACTS
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) regulates and supervises Canadian broadcasting and telecommunications. It exists to make sure those services actually serve the needs and interests of Canadian citizens, industries, and interest groups, and its policies are guided by the Broadcasting Act, Telecommunications Act, and Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules. One of the most important provisions of their existence is to protect Canadians from unsolicited communications — which means that no telemarketer is legally allowed to contact a household or person against their wishes. On CRTC’s official website, there is a National Do Not Call List (DNCL) where Canadians can register their number if they do not want to receive telemarketing calls. Once registered, the number will be added to the list within 24 hours. Telemarketers have a legal obligation to update their information on a monthly basis to make sure they do not call anyone that registered their numbers. The number will remain registered on the DNCL for five years, after which time, they must be registered again. Some calls — registered charities, newspapers, political parties and candidates, and any business you permit to contact you — are exempt from the DNCL.
The Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules set guidelines that telemarketers must follow. A telemarketer is expected to identify who they are, and to be able to provide a valid fax or telephone number upon request. The number they are calling from must be displayed, and they are only allowed to contact you between certain hours. They are also not allowed to use devices that make automatic calls with a pre-recorded message, unless it is from the police or fire department, schools, hospitals and/or appointment reminders.
THE GOOD LIFE DEBACLE
Automatic calls — recently getting press as “robo-calls” — are a much bigger deal than they may seem: GoodLife Fitness Centers were ordered to pay a $300,000 fine to the receiver general (who, among other things, accepts money on the government’s behalf) for their violation of this specific provision in 2011. The calls were only meant to notify club members of new club openings and to invite them to the opening events, but the problem was that they used automated calling devices without first obtaining consent from their clients. “Telemarketers that inundate Canadians with unwanted phone calls are not engaging in a legitimate marketing practice,” said Andrea Rosen, the CRTC chief compliance and enforcement officer in a statement regarding this event. “We expect the business community to follow the rules at all times, and we will vigorously investigate breaches.” In addition to the fine, GoodLife agreed to stop breaking the CRTC’s rules, organized a business education event in association with the CRTC to endorse compliance with telemarketing rules, and published corrective notices.
However, is it only big companies like GoodLife that are held to a higher standard of accountability? If and when shit hits the fan, smaller startup companies are less likely to be held accountable because less people know and care about them — why bother with the little fish in a big vast ocean? Let it flap around a while and it’ll tire itself out, right? Maybe not. In a February 2010 Globe and Mail article, “Only the lonely heed the call of the telemarketer,” Leah McLaren postulated that workaholics (or in our case, students staring at a book or computer screen for an extended period of time) eventually become desperate for social interaction. That makes them potentially defenseless against telemarketers and all their ploys. And this is indeed something that telemarketers sometimes play on. “From listening to the older people who did this daily, you would learn how to be sly and work your way to convince people,” admits Dana. “I would say kindness was key [in convincing people to talk to you].”
The CRTC takes their National Do Not Call List very seriously: in April of this year alone, 11 small companies were penalized with fines totaling to $41,000 for more serious breaches, while Bell Canada received a $1.3-million fine for calling Canadians who had registered on the DNCL in December 2010. Since its establishment in September 2008, the list has grown to approximately 10.6 million registered phone numbers, with so many people trying to register online on the first day of registration for the DNCL that the server crashed approximately nine hours after it was launched.
Ironically, Bell Canada was the company responsible for operating the DNCL and fixing the crashed server at this time. The amount of people registering their numbers on the first day of the initiative greatly exceeded expectations, which is a pretty good indication of how desperate the general public were — and evidently still are — to be free of telemarketing calls.
Everything seems set in place for telemarketers to be held accountable to the public, but is the Do Not Call List just another good idea that works well in theory, but not necessarily in practice? In March 2010, the federal government revealed that although they had imposed $73,000 in fines for violations regarding the DNCL since 2008, only $250 had actually been collected. None of the companies had officially refused to pay the fine, they just didn’t pay it. The point isn’t whether or not the CRTC is doing their job, but that they have made multiple attempts to make telemarketing less of a nuisance for Canadians. The CRTC can continue to review and revamp their system and find new ways to ensure accountability from companies and individual telemarketers, but why waste all that time and effort to maintain and control something as trivial as telemarketing? Other strategies, like advertising in newspapers or on websites such as YouTube, would be much more effective than calling home after home only to have random people hang up on you. It’s a depressing job for the telemarketer, a pain for whoever has to answer the call, and rarely earns the small company any business.
THE TELEMARKETER EXPERIENCE
“The older people were very kind and helpful, [but] the management didn’t care about you at all,” says Dana of her experience. “You made your own hours and did as you pleased. But you made $10 an hour, and minimum wage was $8.25 at the time. Money is money.” On one side of the line, there are Canadians who want to have their privacy protected and their rights respected — and the CRTC is working towards that goal. On the other side, however, telemarketers themselves might be pleasant people caught doing a job they don’t like. But they wouldn’t need our sympathy if they had an alternative.
Callers aren’t particularly fond of telemarketers, telemarketers aren’t particularly fond of telemarketing, and with all other media available, new businesses do not absolutely need to rely on telemarketing methods. “It was an experience,” admits Dana. “But I would never do it again.”
