What's wrong with hanging up on telemarketers?

[KellyHabersham]

My current gripe with telemarketers is the fact that when they do call, they apparently cannot hear me pick up/answer the phone, and start spouting out "Hello? Hello?". Which makes me wonder how things are set up on their end that they are NOT alerted to the fact that the person HAS picked up and answered the phone.

[HYHYBT]

In turn, my gripe with answering machines is that you cannot set them to ring more than four times without turning them off entirely. There are a couple of people I know where you *have* to call a second time to give them time to get to the phone. If they *still* don't answer, *then* leave a message.

I'm the same way with my cell phone. When I didn't have voice mail, it would ring for a full minute. Which meant I could be asleep with it charging in the other room and still get to it in time. When I finally got around to setting up voice mail, it immediately changed to ringing only 20 seconds, which is unreasonably short unless you keep the thing on you all the time. And why should I have to do that at home? So yes, by all means, hang up and call right back the first time. Because I also hate either trying to call back and finding you're still talking to the voice mail, or waiting indefinitely for the VM to finish first only for it to turn out you weren't leaving one and I could have just called you back.

Better yet, email me. No matter what odd hours I've been keeping, I've only rarely been awoken by an email.

[smileyeagle1021]

My current gripe with telemarketers is the fact that when they do call, they apparently cannot hear me pick up/answer the phone, and start spouting out "Hello? Hello?". Which makes me wonder how things are set up on their end that they are NOT alerted to the fact that the person HAS picked up and answered the phone.

I can actually answer that one. Telemarketing companies use autodialing systems. They know that a certain percentage of calls won't be answered, so they are dialing more numbers than there are people waiting for a call. It takes a few seconds between when the system detects someone answering and when the call is connected... those couple of seconds is when you are saying hello etc.
The better telemarketers are trained to just assume that the line connecting is you saying hello and to start as if you just heard the person.

[jackfaire]

I spent three days working in telemarketing, I was desperate, the predominant opinon was if you don't want what I have to sell then hang up right away don't waste my time listening or saying no thank you.

[Fryk]

I did that too, Jack. It was one of the only jobs I have ever been fired from. Seems I wasn't being pushy enough

[jackfaire]

I did that too, Jack. It was one of the only jobs I have ever been fired from. Seems I wasn't being pushy enough

I quit when the following things were said,

"We do not want you to lie you should never lie to our prospective customers"

"Tell your customers (insert lie here)"

Yeah I walked out that day. I never even collected the pay check it felt dirty