Have your Voicemail press 1 to deal with Telemarketers

I’ve suggested this in other posts and forums, but I think everyone should put a ‘1’ tone in their voice mail greetings. Most robocalls have you press ‘1’ in order to be transferred. It’s so common, that the telemarketing industry refers to it as a “Press 1 Campaign”. It’s easy to just Google that and find lots of companies who use this robo calling technique.

So why should you put a DTMF ‘1’ in your Voicemail greeting? It makes the robo-calling autodialer believe that someone pressed one to talk to an agent. So, their robot calls and your robot responds. Serves them right.

You can here an example here:

In this case, it was a typical credit card scammer.

The reason this is a good idea is because of the way autodialers are programmed. The goal of the robocall / autodialers is to connect “interested” parties to the right live agent. In an ideal telemarketing world, all their live human agents will be constantly busy talking to prospective customers.

In order to accomplish this, the robocall / autodialers makes a lot of phone calls hoping to find an answer. This could be thousands of calls a minute. Once someone answers, the autodialer will play the robocall. Some small percentage of people will be “interested” and press ‘1’. Then the call is connected to the live human agent. So the more live human agents are waiting calls, the more calls the autodialer / robocall system will make trying to find someone who will respond.

The nice thing about this, is the converse is also true! The more agents are busy, the less outbound phone calls the autodialer / robocalls make. After all, they don’t want to have a potential customer reach dead air and hang up. So the autodialers throttle back the call volume to reduce the abandon call rate.

So we have two benefits. First, more of the live agents are talking to voice mail boxes for no profit. Second, fewer outbound telemarketing calls are being made, further reducing the number of sales made. Enough reduction in sales, and this eat into their profit margin. Eat into it enough, and it’s not sufficiently profitable anymore.

And since the whole reason these telemarketers are doing this – is the money. Hurt the flow of money, and they will eventually stop. So annoy a bunch of telemarketers today! Add that tone to your voice mail greeting!

Comments are closed.