Surveys or sneaky ways of trying to sell you something

I am absolutely certain that I am not alone when it comes to hating the phone calls that try to sell me something or are “simply doing a survey”.

Have you ever noticed how they perform according to a script?

It’s usually “Good Mr./Ms how are you?”

To which of course you are supposed to respond with something like “I’m fine thank you, can I help you?"

Instead of what you really want to say which is more likely to be along the lines of: "Who wants to know? Who the hell are you and what do you want? I am just about to “

At this point the caller—who could be someone from a call centre in India or somewhere else in the world will then proceed with the real purpose of the call which is to tell you the wonderful news about whatever product their company happens to be
marketing at that point in time.

By allowing the call to proceed to this point you have just confirmed to the caller that you are normal, polite, and somewhat tolerant and you have also provided some really meaningful information. You have told the caller and his/her company that you
are who they think you are, and you have confirmed that you are of a particular gender, that your phone number is correct and that you are at home doing something at this time of the day.

Now ALL of this is more information about you than you may wish the caller to know.

So what can you do to prevent yourself from giving away all of this information?

The most useful tip that I have for people is that they should recognise that the other party is following a script and simply interfere with it.

For example, when the first part of the script is stated respond with something completely unexpected like:

“Do you have $1,000 handy?”

The person at the other end will in all likelihood look at the possible answers
to his or her question and be totally bamboozled about how to respond.

Press your advantage at this point and say something like, “If you would care to let me have your bank account details so that I can debit your account to the value of $1,000 I will be happy to continue this call.”

At this point even the most persistent caller will hang up AND with any luck will place a big black mark against your name on the list he/she has been provided noting that you are a waste of time and space to call again.

At the end of the day, their job is to try and get your attention about whatever it is they are selling and YOUR job is to protect your privacy, ensure that you do NOT get called again and where possible, let people know that your time and your intellectual property are valuable commodities. Provided that they are willing to pay, you might be persuaded to part with some, for a fee.

The psychology of interfering with scripts is really simple. Most people perform tasks in a way that becomes routine over time. Thus how you respond to greetings, how you do things is usually conditioned over time by repetition until it becomes so well learned that you have virtually automatic responses. People who call you to try and sell you something rely on this training. They create a script that stimulates the normal auto responses and before you know it they have obtained details about you and your habits. Even if they do not make a sale at that point they have obtained information about you that they can then on-sell to others and take advantage of when they call again. Similarly if you allow web sites to control your browsing by permitting cookies you will be sending information back to the source that can identify your browsing habits and hence provide valuable information that the site can then use to target further information to you and at the same time, if they are really clever, use data mining techniques to aggregate the information that they obtain and so develop a data base over time that they can use for their own marketing purposes or to on sell to others who may wish to market something that happens to be suitable for people with your profile.

There is not much you can do about modern technology so as it becomes more intrusive in your life you can at least start thinking of ways to control and benefit from the intrusion that is inevitable.

Your information and your privacy is valuable charge for it or protect it but do NOT give it away.