Don't yank my chain, asshole

[ShadowBall]

I had to bicker with two morons on the phones today trying to find a manager. As per work, I have to call places and ask to talk to a manager of certain departments. And as per policy, we have to tell the secretaries and operators the absolute minimum as far as why we're calling because of course they won't let us talk to anyone if we say we're selling shit.

Twice today, I had some dickbag say shit to me like, "Well what exactly kind of hiring questions? I can help you with that." or "Maybe if you be more specific, I can help you." And so forth. This itself is a slight irritating, but I know why it happens - why bug the manager if the rep can help?

Thing is we actually don't have questions - we just have to BS our way through the secretaries to get to a manager, and it makes us look like bastards when we bite and say, "No, we have no questions. We just want to see if the manager wants to read our magazine" because the fuckers aren't satisfied with, "We have questions for the manager. Not for you."

Then after trying as politely as possible to get through them, they tell me they themselves are the manager and that they aren't interested. This is what pissed me off.

Goddamn fucking assholes, I wish they'd just tell me they're the manager I need rather than yank me around for five minutes. I know they might not want to talk to us, and they can just say "We're not interested" and hang up. But what's so hard about saying, "I'm the manager" when I ask for the manager? And it wasn't a case of English being the person's second language either - these people were just plain thick.

I may just be being overly pissy, but man today was long and this shit bugs me so bad. Mostly because I sometimes hear about it from my bitch of a boss.

[Daemonmonkey]

"Well I'm sorry you have to work as both manager and secretary, and I don't think you will be a good business partner in the future, sorry to have bothered you" <evil grin>

[bankworking]

I always hate when someone insists on speaking to the manager without letting me know the reason. 9 times out of 10, it's a problem with an account or loan that the same manager has to come to ME to help solve. Because I deal with the accounts/loans every day, I've got more working knowledge about troubleshooting than my manager (now my assistant manager could help with whatever, but manager didn't work her way up through the ranks like AM did).

But I will direct the call that way if one insists. Of course, our managers cannot make any decision as to sales/purchases outside ones with the companies we're already contracted through, so it wouldn't do you much good to talk to my manager. You'd have to talk to marketing, and the numbers I can give you for them all lead to voice-mails. If you wanted to talk to the CEO, that would go a secretary, who has the same job as probably every other receptionist of filtering out calls such as marketing calls so the CEO doesn't get bothered by them.

A crappy thing to do to pretend they aren't the manager when in fact they are. If you were an important customer, wouldn't that piss you off? Seems like a rather dumb decision. Makes me wonder if they lied and the actual manager just wasn't available.

[KiaKat]

I always, 100% of the time, ask what the call is in regards to before replying that I'm the manager.

Why?

Scams. We get a *lot* of scams calls, and if I indicate that I'm the manager, then I end up having to hang up on them. If I act as a brick wall and play dumb, then the scammer will go away without me having to get aggressive.

If it's a legit telemarketer, then I can just say "the manager has told me not to pass on any telemarketing calls. If we do not already do business with you, we are not going to in the future. Take us off your list, and have a good day."

I manage a small business. I don't have time to sit and listen to a script, when I know the answer is going to be "no." Especially when I've got the phone ringing off the hook. And most of the telemarketers who call me either won't take "no" for an answer (so I have to hang up on them) or won't let me get a word in edgewise because they're talking over me.

[nicolecj]

My favorite is when a sales person gets through to me. In government service no manager has even an iota of purchasing power, and all sales pitches have to be sumitted as a bid to the appropriate authority. It is actually funny when they try because the more experienced sales persons know not to call, so we know it is someone who did not do his homework or someone who is having a prank pulled on them.

[protege]

We get quite a few scams at work, usually involving printer or copier supplies. In my office, 3 criteria come into play...

1. Since I technically *am* a manager, and I handle our tech needs, those calls get routed to me. It's gotten to the point that I can easily spot a scam. There's absolutely *no* reason why someone would be calling me to ask for my (hopelessly outdated) crappy copier's serial number. Not even the guy I call to service the equipment would ask for that--he only deals with manufacturers and model numbers.

2. My boss has said not to pass these calls to him. He doesn't have the time to deal with them. Plus, 99.9% of the time, they can't match the deals we already get. Our local supply house is pretty generous with discounts. Unless you're willing to give us things for free, we're not switching.

3. If you are a scammer, don't try to bullshit *me* when I ask you what company you work for. 99.9% of the time, you'll hang up at that point.

[PatchO'Black]

Hopefully, I'm not going into Fratching territory with this...

While I can understand how the OP might be frustrated, I'm afraid that I'm on the side of the secretaries and other employees who don't immediately transfer calls to a manager just because the person on the other line asks for a manager. The manager most likely has asked them to screen the calls instead of blindly transferring them over. I can also see how they would be disinclined to want to do business with a company that has a policy of not being up-front with the nature of their calls, in an effort to do an end-run around the employees. It may make the jobs of people in phone-sales harder, but then again, if they don't want phone solicitation, then it is unlikely that they are going to be more receptive to a sales pitch after being told the call was for something else.

[KellyHabersham]

The manager most likely has asked them to screen the calls instead of blindly transferring them over.

Such was the case with my secretary job - sometimes the person whom the caller was asking for was not in the office at the moment, and I knew that Pastor Nancy definitely was NOT interested in talking to telemarketers.

[tollbaby]

Hm. nope, sorry. I have to side with the managers on this one. You don't know how many calls I've had to field from temp agencies, printer cartridge salesmen, etc. who are trying to get to my boss. My boss doesn't have the time, nor the inclination to deal with salesmen on the phone. He's made it MY responsibility to make sure that those calls don't get to him. When a salesman tells me "oh no, they're questions for your BOSS, you can't help me." that's strike one. When I tell them he really isn't interested, and they say they need to hear it from him, that's strike two. Then when they start saying they'll just call back later when I've gone home? Yeah, strike three, and now I ask to speak to YOUR manager, because we're a government office, which you knew before phoning us (all gov't phone numbers in my area start with 9, and they're the ONLY ones that do), and you're harassing me.

I've worked in telemarketing too, and I know it's hard. Blame your company for choosing to do business that way.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

When a salesman tells me "oh no, they're questions for your BOSS, you can't help me." that's strike one. .

This.

Especially back when my husband was self employed and working from a home office and I answered the phone in my kitchen.

I told them lucky for them, they'd got the boss. Me. The woman banging Mr. Kinkoid. Banging Mr. Kinkoid automatically makes me the boss. Hell, it makes me the president of the freaking company.

They need to bring a big damn dog to that fight.

[MoonCat]

This.

Especially back when my husband was self employed and working from a home office and I answered the phone in my kitchen.

I told them lucky for them, they'd got the boss. Me. The woman banging Mr. Kinkoid. Banging Mr. Kinkoid automatically makes me the boss. Hell, it makes me the president of the freaking company.

They need to bring a big damn dog to that fight.

I love it.

We calls like that now and then at the call center, and it's really a waste of the telemarketer's time. My immediate manager doesn't have any purchasing power; his boss might (I'm not sure), but she won't buy anything sight-unseen over the phone; and I'm sure the company already has a deal in place for whatever supplies we need; last but not least, we're cutting expenses, not looking for ways to increase them.

[ShadowBall]

When a salesman tells me "oh no, they're questions for your BOSS, you can't help me." that's strike one. When I tell them he really isn't interested, and they say they need to hear it from him, that's strike two. Then when they start saying they'll just call back later when I've gone home? Yeah, strike three...

Hehe, that's a routine I must follow very single day. I beg you to call my boss and set her straight, honestly.

And trust me, I get why managers must screen their calls - I know they don't all have loads of time to listen to us ramble about something they most likely will not even want in the first place. And even though I'm not supposed to, when someone tells me the manager does not take cold calls, I wish the secretary a good day and go to another call. I know they are doing their own jobs and I'm not going to sit and argue my way to a manager like an asshole. If someone else wants to try and get through, they can have at it.

Honestly, when I had nothing else left as far as rebuttals, I would bite and say, "I'm really calling to ask if the manager would like to have a look at our (reading material)." And there have been times I would explain to the secretaries that I'm not personally trying to be a douchebag...it's just we must have an official "yes" or "no" from the manager themselves to take them off the call list as per company policy. It really sucks, but most people I talk to are nice about it and realize I'm just a peon and I do not control things.

So I do commend the ladies and gentleman who are doing their jobs at keeping us phone strumpets out...I simply was bitching because we get lectured up and down by the already asshole bosses if we do not get a lead to a manager or if we're heard telling a secretary the real reason we're calling.

While I have had some people get pissed for multiple calls, I have to say none of them have been mad at me personally. Just at the company, so that I'm glad for and I do promise to help them however I can...which is basically marking them as a no-sale and giving them the main office's number to complain. The best way, it seems, to keep our asses out is to not accept blocked numbers (which ours is). I wish we did things a little more honestly rather than told to be aggressive with the secretaries.

[EricKei]

Shadow - It sucks that you have to deal with that. I'll admit, I've been on the "reception" side of that equation...The thing is, we got to know which places were scams partially because we began to recognize their voices... >_>

Maybe yer manager will listen to the one thing that matters to them -- money -- and let you hang up on those calls/nix them from the call list permanently as soon as you can tell you won't be getting through...?

You know you won't make the sale -- thus, it's a waste of your time and the company's money to have you (or anyone else) speak to that office.

You know that the people there don't want to listen -- which is another reason to remove them from the list.

If your manager will actually listen, you can tell them a wonderful way to save your company tons of money on labor expenses by only maintaining calls to places that might actually have a nonzero chance of becoming clients ^_^

[Kogarashi]

I was in a similar situation for about a month with a temp job at an outbound call center. The major difference was that we weren't technically cold-calling, because supposedly each person we called had agreed to receive a call from us (usually by signing up online). The calls were for enrolling people in those "get your high school/college diploma" programs, in our case done by Kaplan and the Univeristy of Phoenix.

The biggest problem is that, due to confidentiality (according to management), we weren't supposed to tell anyone but the name on the contact list why we were calling, which led to a lot of question-dodging. We were supposed to say, "May I speak with Soandso?" If asked why, simply repeat that we were calling for Soandso, and would call back later if they were unavailable. Sometimes we could say that it was regarding something they'd signed up for, but we weren't supposed to embarrass the potential customer by telling other people at their home or place of work that it was for completing their education.

One of the biggest problems I saw with that scenario is that we'd have spouses or boy/girlfriends upset at their significant other being called by some stranger for undefined purposes, or angry parents because the name on our list turned out to be a 12-year-old or younger. I highly suspect a lot of signups were due to those ads for "Win a free PS3/Xbox/iPod/whatever!" that you see online, that require you to jump through twenty billion hoops of declining offers that supposedly defray the cost of the "free" electronics. I bet every one of those kids we called were putting in their info because they wanted a game system that they almost certainly never actually received.

And if we couldn't get a hold of our named contact? We had to try again later. The saving grace? There were check boxes on each contact list, four or five per name. Each time you called, you checked off a box. Fill in all the boxes, and even if you never got a hold of the contact, they were pulled from the calling list (or so our managers claimed). If the contact said "not interested" or some permutation of those words, they were pulled from the list. If the contact mentioned the company's Do Not Call list, they also got pulled (and management had to fill out a crapton of paperwork). If the name was fradulent or belonged to a minor, they got pulled. What really drove me out of there wasn't the customers we were calling, it was management and their crazy ideas of what was humanly possible on the phones.

[ShadowBall]

I wish we could gank names from our call list after five tries, but we have to call call call for days until we get through to someone. And as of recently, we've been told we're not allowed to say, "I need to talk to (whoever), please." We can't say "please" - just demand a name. I can't help it if a please comes out automatically from me - if I'm asking someone for help or to send me someplace, I'm going to goddamn thank them.

And we've also been told to say "yes" when asked, "Is (whoever) expecting your call?" as well as saying, "No" when asked if it's a sales call. The excuse we get told by the boss is that since we are not asking these folks to buy anything right now (just try it for a month or so)...no, we'll just charge them when they inevitably forget about the subscription. Niiiice honest sales tactics we've got going on. This is not going to go over too well with managers if they think we're an expected caller and we end up trying to sell them shit, or if the secretary tells them it's not a sales call and it is because then the poor secretary will hear about it. I know I'd sure as hell be pissed under either circumstances if I were receiving these calls.

And I *hate* when we have a manager tell us they aren't interested. We've got a list of common reasons these folks will refuse us (not interested, costs too much, tried offers like this before and were too hard to cancel, etc.) and we have to try and convince them otherwise...the system is simple, it's free to try, blah blah blah. I actually prefer when I hear, "I don't want it" and am promptly hung up on so I don't need to try and convince people when they obviously have no intention of buying.

And sadly, we're also going to be doing some kind of online schooling cold-calling soon. Ugh.