Much Ado About Telemarketing
A visitor stopping by last night seemingly expected to find a bit of a rant of the current telemarketing legal fiasco. I had, in fact, quite purposely refrained from comment about this, or about anti-spam legislation due to a basic "fear of rejection". You see, my opinions on such matters are not likely to assist me in winning friends. This is a wildly popular cause – opposing it publicly is akin to not kissing babies or dissing Mom’s apple pie.
And I must honestly admit that I really don’t “oppose” these laws. I just think they’re useless. A quick perusal of my current resume will show the curious something of a clue as to why I believe this.
Note that a lot of my work has been related to computer telephony. What’s not explicitly in there is the fact that I was quite intimately involved in the automated telemarketing industry early in my programming career. I hasten to add (for fear of jeopardizing future contract opportunities) that I'm no longer involved in any way with telemarketing, automated or otherwise. And I’ve never been involved with spamming in any way.
Also not on the resume, basically because it’s been so long ago and isn’t relevant to my career, are the jobs I held as a mailing machine technician. I worked as a tech for both Friden and Pitney-Bowes in the late seventies and very early eighties, and the majority of our large customers were direct mail houses.
So I’ve seen both the telemarketing and direct mail industries from the inside.
I was real good at it, too. Not to brag too much, but chances are, if you got a phone call in the late 80's or early 90's from some stupid machine trying to sell you a lot at "Pair O'Dice Estates" or “Easy Term Life with no exam” it was my software driving the engine.
I've written number generation routines, which can call an entire exchange. I've written "predictive dialers" (which won't do what's described in the link, unless the company running it cuts back on live agents to save money and doesn't bother changing the software configuration to match).
I've also spent some time listening to the recordings made of some of these calls - the amount of abuse that the poor working stiffs put up with because they interrupted someone's dinner is nothing short of amazing. A direct quote (my favorite):
This here’s Joe, and it’s my bar, and my payphone, and if ya’ll call me one more time trying to sell this shit, I’m gonna ram a thermite grenade up yer ass!
And, of course, I've been on the other side of the line, pestered and annoyed like the rest of the populace. Well, perhaps not as much as the majority, because I have a zapper (a signaling device to disconnect automated calls) installed, as well as caller ID. And if you ever call me and I don’t recognize your number, don't be surprised if you don't hear "Hello?" - you're more likely to get "Greetings and Salutations", or even "Yo!". Detection routines work off timing, you measure the average length of a "hello" and if you get something longer assume you've called a business line and hang it up.
You know why telemarketers are still in business? Because they make money. Why do they make money? Because a lot of people actually buy the products they pitch.
It costs a typical "boiler room" next to nothing (less than $50k) to set up and dial everybody in a major metro area once. Walk the logic with me: let's say you make half a million calls, half of which are bad numbers (business, etc.). Of the remaining 250,000 calls, lets say that 98% hang up immediately, abuse the agent or are otherwise a waste.
Let's further assume that they're selling real estate, insurance or mortgage refi's, and that the gross profit on a closed sale is $100.
You've just made ten times your initial investment. Not bad for two weeks work.
Same dynamic applies with spam - only there the rejection rate is much higher, more like 99.9%. But because of the very low cost, and the much higher volume, that one-tenth of one percent can generate substantial income. Very substantial.
When the national "do not call" list goes into effect (and it will go into effect, make no mistake) what do you suppose that the telemarketers are going to do? Roll over, play dead and give up their livelihood? Don't count on it.
With the advent of voice over IP and the falling price of international interconnection rates, I think it's very likely that they'll move offshore. And continue to interrupt your dinner from Aruba or Bangalore, beyond the reach of the FTC, FCC or whichever other alphabet soup agency get the green light for the list implementation.
Ditto with the spammers.
You'll see a lull for a while, but only until the cost of the call comes back down. Once that happens, it's basically game over, unless we want to start blocking all international calls or net access. Which would be pretty pointless, of course.
The only possible way to stop telemarketing (or spamming) is to raise the cost of contact (either call or email) to the point where the companies cannot make a profit. For an preview of how high this cost has to be, take a look at your "real" inbox, your snail mailbox.
How many credit card offers, mortgage refi's pitches, or auto insurance brochures did you get today? How much did the printing, stuffing and postage cost on those things?
Most of those pieces cost between $0.25 and $0.50 to produce and deliver. Would you be willing to pay that to send an email or make a phone call? Yes, it'd have to be applied universally to be effective - the network (either PSTN or packet) has no clue if you're telemarketing, spamming or calling Aunt Sally. Chances are, you wouldn't. It won't happen.
So basically, Congress or various state legislatures can waste all of the time they want writing and passing anti-spam and do not call laws. They're useless. In fact, they’re worse than useless, because even if they work exactly as described, they’ll have consequences no one has really thought about.
A curious fact often overlooked in this whole debate is that these laws may actually be environmentally damaging. Think about it - you're a company with a product to sell to the general public. You want to advertise. You want to target the folks your ad reaches – how you gonna do that? You can spam, telemarket or direct mail. If the first two options are gone from legal concerns, that leaves only direct mail. How many more dead trees does that create?
Phone calls and spam have a couple of things in common – they’re incredibly efficient (from an engineering standpoint) means of communication. And they don’t kill trees. At least not like printing presses and envelope machines do!
Stranger still are the exemptions built into the various laws: they almost always exempt political campaigns, charities and newspapers! Those, my friends, are the three biggest consumers of telemarketing resources in the country! So, even if the laws we in place, the three biggest dialers would still be legally able to interrupt your dinner urging you to vote for Joe Schmoe, give money to the Disunited Path or subscribe to the Hoboken Times! These exemptions are why the industry hasn’t been howling louder than it has – it could survive just fine in a worst-case scenario with these exemptions in place!
So, viewed from the perspective of someone who’s “been there, done that”, these laws are all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, as Shakespeare once put it – “Much Ado About Nothing”.
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