Save us from telephone spam
The first call that I received this morning on my cellphone was from a company that was trying to sell me insurance. The company had gotten my number from Telefonica (thanks Telefonica, you don’t know how happy I am that you make money from providing my cellphone number to third parties who hassle me with calls and messages).
Through a combination of being methodical, joining every Robinson list I come across, and by patience (which means not being rude to the person on the other end of the phone, and instead applying a tone along the lines of, “I do not care if you offer me all the tea in China, I will never buy something over the phone”) I have managed to reduce the amount of calls of this type I receive compared to a few years ago, but there are still companies out there who think that the best way to sell me something is by hassling me with spam calls via a channel as sensitive as a cellphone.
Aware of the issue, I have been gratified to note of late that more and more companies are making a living by creating applications designed to protect us from this type of spam. Apps such as Phone Warrior, Whoscall or Truecaller are based on a series of common principles: a centralized database with information about the numbers used to generate phone spam (in some cases, with information supplied by the users themselves), a system that allows for real time visualization of data about the number that is calling, along with an application that manages certain calls by sending them straight to message, or by blocking them.
Few things dent a company’s image these days more than the use of intrusive channels for their marketing. If telemarketing is by its nature intrusive, then using the cellphone is even more so. That said, it is still very popular, and the rules governing it are complex and far from satisfactory. Yes, we can argue that these types of campaign work if we assess the percentage of sales obtained on the basis of their cost, but even so, we should ask ourselves at what cost. We are talking here about outdated concepts such as “sales above all else”, that use arguments able to counter any objection, along with sales techniques based on taking advantage of most people’s politeness and inability to simply hang up the phone.
This is not a problem that we can tackle unaided: you can log all the numbers you want, but others will always take their place. So we can only hope that more and more of these types of applications spread: adding information after hanging up a cold call is obviously a good idea. If we also perfect the system with blacklists and white lists, and with ways to keep others informed, this could really work.
Whether these types of applications are successful will obviously depend not only on the way they are developed, but on how popular they prove in their respective markets, and their efficiency in quickly identifying the numbers used to generate spam: systems based only on word of mouth face the problem of some people mistakenly reporting numbers as spam when they are not, so a certain degree of oversight will be necessary if they are to work properly. But a reasonable degree of efficiency that reduces the number of calls we answer, and that allows for the speedy reporting of spam numbers (and which involves a certain degree of “therapeutic revenge” :-) seems to me to be a very necessary service.
