Outsourced telesales – do they think it helps?

In the past week I’ve had two semi-cold calls on my mobile phone. I say semi-cold because they were from Telstra and Optus respectively, which I have accounts with so I’m an existing customer. That’s not exactly cold calling but neither were the calls from their local HQ relating to matters about my accounts. They were trying to sell me stuff. Both of which failed on really quite fundamental levels and which I think is kinda symptomatic of the way these companies think about their customers.

Firstly, the Telstra call came in bang on dinner time and I was in a restaurant. I explained I was in a restaurant and the guy carried on and asks if he can have some of my time. Erm, no pal you can’t because, you know, sat on your mobile to some fucking mobile phone salesman plankton in the middle of a restaurant is clearly not socially acceptable behavior… He then actually harumphs at me and there’s no mistaking his theatrical huffy exclamation that he’ll try call me some other time. Fucking right on pal, top attitude. Wont even pick it up next time. If you don’t understand that you are calling at our sufferance then it strikes me you don’t have a very good grasp of your job…

The second call, from Optus, was an entirely different beast. Perfectly polite operator but clearly wasn’t a native English speaker. That’s okay, there’s plenty of migrants in the country and obviously this sort of job probably has more than it’s fair share. That said, you know that this call centre isn’t in Australia. The diabolical call quality is a giveaway. I seem to be getting this a lot, people calling from companies with just abominable call quality presumably via some cheap-ass VOIP solution. One particular outfit, calling after I ordered stuff online, called me half a dozen times and I said clearly down the line each time that I couldn’t understand them – the line quality was unintelligible. Eventually they gave up.

So, the Optus call. They’re trying to get me to move my Internet and phone service to Optus. As usual with these calls it starts off by them asking me how much I spend. As usual with these calls I have no intention of telling them. I don’t know. Just approximate. I don’t know, those details aren’t to hand. Right well did you know… click. Now that click wasn’t me, though you know that is something I might consider, the click was them. The (shitty) line just went dead. No call back either. So it was either them not being arsed (they asked about types of calls I make and I said “Skype”), or their shitty VOIP system again.

This is the same Optus that sends extraordinarily trashy adverts via SMS to my phone unsolicited. To be fair I texted them to stop and they did. And charged me for the message texting them to stop too, which is nice of them. They also charge me money to send a paper bill. Which is amusing because their online service is broken almost all of the time in new and interesting ways and the whole issue of getting a simple fucking log-in to it required weeks and calls to their customer service. I get the paper bill because it looks like you can’t fuck that up and then you charge me for it? Niiice.

The takeaway from this is that I didn’t want the calls in the first place (who does?) but accepting that these are inevitable is it not at least a good idea to put your best foot forward? After all, I’m even more hacked off with these companies than I was before. Alright, probably not strictly speaking possible with the incompetent pack of fuckwitry that appear to constitute Optus but still…

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The same outfits that extol the virtues of how great it is to communicate in all their advertising but then replace human beings with diabolical automated voice mail systems were never really ‘on message’ with their own business goals were they?