Thursday, July 4

How To Stop Silent And Unwanted Telephone Sales Calls

Stop unwanted phone calls

Don't you just hate those unwanted telephone sales calls? Often they seem to call just as we are having lunch or at tea time and some are even silent calls. So what do you do about them?

I should say that this is about calls received in the UK, so apologies to overseas readers.

To stop the unwanted calls the first advice always given is to register with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). This will stop a lot of the calls. As TPS explain:

"It is a legal requirement that all organisations (including charities, voluntary organisations and political parties) do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS unless they have your consent to do so."

So you'd think this would stop the calls, but unfortunately it doesn't. Many come from call centres abroad and others will claim they are not 'sales' orientated, when in fact they are. So what else can you do? Here's a couple of suggestions I got recently:

"Do you get those annoying calls with no one on the other end? This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day a person answers the phone. This is then used to determine the bet time of day for a 'real' salesperson to get someone at home.

"What you can do after answering: If you notice there is no one there immediately start hitting the # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialled the call and it kicks you out of the system. Gosh! what a shame you are no longer in their system!"

You can also register with Silentcall-gard. It's free to register. It won't stop all of them - but it helps.

Now moving on to actual sales calls:

"If someone is on the line and it's an obvious sales call the following may help you at least feel better.

"Simply say three words ... 'Hold on please.'

"Say this while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging up immediately) this would make each telemarketing call so much more time consuming. Then when you eventually hear BT's 'beep-beep-beep' tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset. You have efficiently completed your task. Those three little words could help eliminate soliciting."

If you have any other techniques for stopping those unwanted sales calls please leave them as a comment and I'll add them to this post - thanks.

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5 comments:

  1. These techniques should work in the U.S., too, Mike. Thanks!

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    1. Hope they work - we've been getting a spell of sales calls recently, often from India and Pakistan - most annoying.

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  2. Oh I love that pound key, 6-7 times you say?!! Should work but I think the three little words will be a lot more fun! Thank you Mike.

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    Replies
    1. Oh yes, 6 - 7! Be good if it worked in the US too.

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