Blind Calls By Deaf People

They call me almost every week. I recognize them as they are the only callers not presenting their caller id. The sales people working for my mobile service provider. Yes I must have had agreed somewhere in my contract to let my MNO contact me over the phone. Silly me. But I really did not realize they can be so silly too...

They call me when I am on vacation, interrupting my sea - side lazy afternoons. Or when I am on a business trip. Generally they call me when I am roaming, forcing me to pay for receiving the calls. Silly approach. Their HLRs know I am on a foreign network, and that generally means it is not the best time trying to sell me something on the phone. Is it such a big IT integration issue for a call center software working for a mobile network operator (MNO) to query a HLR before making a call? Or is it cheaper just to call a subscriber ignorantly pretending the operator's sales department has no idea of subscriber's whereabouts (while the billing department precisely knows where I am)?

Each time they call me they try to offer me some more free minutes. I am an asynchronous data type. I love messaging but I hate voice calls. My monthly plan gives me five hundred minutes. Any unused minutes are carried on to a next month. Over two years or so I have accumulated some five thousand unused minutes on my account. That is what my personalized mobile online portal shows. And each month three hundred new minutes are added to the pile. Again the billing department knows all that. So why on earth a salesman from the same company wastes time to annoy me offering an extra thousand minutes to be added to the same pile? The matter of fact I could sell them some... Again, when pre-selecting subscribers to be called with the bonus offer, would it be so difficult to run a query and check whether a subscriber eats up whatever plan she or he is on?

And somehow they must have figured a subscriber-repelling live sales agent is more cost effective than an email template. I bet there are a lot of people like myself, who prefer to answer an email instead of being molested by a sales voice call. They have my email. And it is really what they try to sell what matters, not how hard they push... What they offer, simply does not address my needs, so I do not buy. They would better listen to what I say... Last time they called I asked if I could buy a new phone instead of piling extra voice minutes. "You cannot, sir." was the answer. Yes I know the tele-salesman is running a computerized script and he has no option of selling me a phone (even if that was what I asked for). But he must have somebody he reports to, who designs those call scripts. They are simply blind, not seeing the opportunity.

And they must be deaf, since it was not just once when I asked for an offer for a new phone. Hello! Can you hear me? My Blackberry is in a really poor condition. I dropped it a number of times on a pavement. It survived, but is badly scratched. And the thumb scroll ball gets stuck quite often. And I would love to have 3G along with my UMA / WiFi calling. I heard the new 9700 Bold can do that. Hello! Can you hear me? Silence... Last week they told me to go to the physical store. Hey, I know precisely what I want. Hey, I even can afford the new toy. Hey, you know my address. And a phone number. Hey, I am willing to spend money on a product you offer. Silence...

Well... Year 2010. Information at fingertips. Digitally modeled processes. They have budgets, they have IT support, they can have almost all information about me they want. Yet they behave like souvenir salesmen walking along beaches. Embarrassing...