The customer is always an asshole: adventures in telemarketing

You know what I'm tired of saying? You know what my family and friends are tired of hearing me say? "I hate my job, and I regret going to college."

Since I got to Athens GA I've been working at call centers. My first call center job was inbound-only (meaning that we didn't make those dreaded cold calls that America hates so much), and my job was to convince people to sign up for credit card processing for a VERY popular piece of accounting software. This job wouldn't have been all bad if we'd been treated more like adults - we weren't allowed to have pen or paper, no jackets/purses, business casual dress ALL THE TIME save for the first weekend of the month, no visible tattoos, blah blah blah. I always wondered, "Why does it matter what I'm wearing and if my tattoo is out if I'm on the phone? I SOUND professional enough." Another big bummer was a HUGE LIE that was told when I started working there: they told me I'd be making one dollar more per hour than I ended up getting. A dollar might not be a big deal to someone in a career field, but for me the news literally crushed me. I tried to take this in stride but the job just didn't have enough perks (or friendly higher-ups) for me to want to stay there. I left a few weeks ago and started at a new call center, where I am my job title changed from "Sales Agent" to "Marketing Communication Specialist."

The job title is so flowery because they don't want me to feel like what I am: a piece of shit telemarketer who cold-calls companies while people are trying to work. I call multi-million dollar corporations and my bosses expect them to just put the CEO on the phone for me. I get hung up on and bullshitted all day. Today I called 223 different businesses in attempt to find out information that's readily available through a Google search, but for some reason our "client" wants to hear it from the CEO's mouth. The particular "program" I'm on has scripting to make it sound like a business opportunity, but upon further research I've discovered that our client has us probing these businesses because they intend to partner with (READ: buy out) a fuck-ton of them. I feel like an asshole when people get excited about the bullshit opportunity I'm describing - and some of them get so excited they offer to invest in new resources (trying to be vague here) in order to get the "job." It's just like when the new Wal-Mart shut down your neighborhood bodega, but these business owners are gonna get reimbursed for their loss. I am paid to lie for a living, and I feel terrible about it.

It makes the job even harder when people see through my scripting and realize what I'm getting at, and then they go off on me. It's hard for me to find these people at fault because I know in my heart that what I do is bullshit. People raise their voices and/or hang up on me because they know I'm a fucking liar, and to be honest I can't blame them. It would be so much better if I could walk away from situations like that thinking, "fuck them," but most of the time I'm just thinking, "Fuck me." I couldn't even feel good about my inbound call center job because we were expected to sell credit card processing to 56% of the people we spoke to daily, though the client's website advertised our number as an information hotline. We had various scare tactics (or "rebuttals" as they like to call them in the industry) and bent truths we'd tell people, and we always acted like the two month trial with no monthly minimum and a free card swipe was a special gift from us, though you could find it advertised on the client's website if you knew where to look. My old "team leader" actually once told me, "You want to treat this like an impulse buy. Make it sound so good that they just HAVE to sign up with you right then, and if they regret it afterwards then it's not your problem." What kind of person feels good about that?

Telesales/telemarketing feeds a lot of families and I'm not taking away from the value of the job at all, but I really thought that by the time I was 30 years old that I'd be doing something that I liked, or that I could at least feel good about.

This job wouldn't be such an emotional drain if people understood what they really need to say to a telemarketer. Marketing calls like the ones I make can be deflected very easily: just say you're not interested and ask to be taken off of the call list. Know that telemarketers are required to "offer a rebuttal" to the first "objection," and you should just listen and then repeat that you're not interested. Also know that we are not allowed to offer ANY rebuttals to requests to remove numbers from the call list. After that they will thank you for your time, hang up, and take your record out of the database. Know these things: if you hang up, we must call back. If you place us on hold indefinitely, we must call back. If you're rude every single time we call, we'll just schedule your number to pop up when you're not at work and we'll call back. If you are an admin who plays the vicious "gatekeeper" to telemarketers, know this: we cannot accept your "we're not interested" because you don't make business decisions for the company. Put the boss on the line for 10 seconds and let him tell us the exact same thing, and then we're done. In the end no one gets yelled at and you don't get called every single day.

Fun fact: this blog is the closest thing to journalism that I've done since I got my worthless BA in it 4 years ago. And seriously, it's not even that good. There are only 2 entries, I ramble, I'm long-winded, I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I'm thinking of just sending my degree back to the university and telling them to fucking keep the piece of shit. I haven't had a single job in journalism since I graduated from college and NONE of the jobs I've had since then have required a college degree. I'm thoroughly convinced that I wasted all that money, and now I'm drowning in debt because I thought that college would actually do me good.