A lot of Telemarketers talk about something called aPress 1 Campaign.You should be familiar with them, as the pre-recorded message does the pitch and invites you to “Press 1” if you are interested. If you press ‘1’, you get connected to a live agent. If you are a Telemarketer Tormentor, you probably do this already in order to play games with the Telemarketer. However, it’s not always convenient to do that.
Which brings me to a fun idea. I don’t know why I haven’t already suggested it. Someone over in 800notes.com(which is a great resource) mentioned that they had a ‘1’ in their answering machine greeting. And of course, robocalls often can’t tell the difference and sometimes transferred the call to an agent. The agent probably wasn’t amused.
Remember back in the “FTC vs Caribbean Cruise Lines” article where I went through some of the math? Companies that outsource their campaigns are typically charged a ‘transfer fee’ for everyone that presses ‘1’. This makes it easy. As part of your answering machine greeting, press ‘1’ and then pause for a second. This might trick more robocalls into thinking a real person has pressed ‘1’ and transfer to a live agent. This is potentially $2-$3 per call, and you don’t have to do anything. Just let the answering machine do the work. If they call back – rinse, wring, repeat – at their expense. You may have to experiment with different timings between your ‘Hello’ and the ‘1’ to trick more Telemarketers. Give us feed back and what works for you.
So change that greeting. The Telemarketer you trick won’t thank you.
Update: I have had one robocall where it wanted you to press ‘2’. So while this may not be permanently disruptive, this shows that it can be effective to make them change their behavior.
image by stockmedia.cc – stockarch.com
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