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Telemarketing is a controversial marketing method conducted over the telephone, often involving cold calling. It has been restricted by laws, including a national do-not-call list, and some companies have faced criticism for using call centers in prisons to exploit cheap labor.
Telemarketing is marketing conducted over the telephone. Most telemarketing calls are “cold calling,” meaning that the recipient of the call has not requested the telemarketer to contact them. Telemarketing is one of the most controversial types of marketing.
The purpose of telemarketing is to make a sale. Sometimes telemarketers have personal information when they call a customer, knowing that the person has purchased products similar to or related to theirs from other vendors or outlets.
Some old telemarketing practices inadvertently caused fear. A common type of automated telemarketing program would be dialing numbers to check for answering machines in order to leave a pre-recorded sales pitch. If a person answered, the program detected a real voice and hung up. Many people were frightened by inexplicable insults, some fearing persecution. It is now illegal for a telemarketer to leave an automated sales pitch on an answering machine.
This hasn’t stopped telemarketing from being blocked, however. Automated callers dial numbers to identify those who are disconnected or out of service, and those answered by fax, voice mail, or person. If your home phone experiences excessive jamming, telemarketers could be the reason. Some organizations are fighting to make this practice illegal, claiming it amounts to harassment.
Public irritation with growing telemarketer calls prompted the US Congress to take legal action in 1991 in the form of restrictive laws. For example, telemarketing calls are legally prohibited between 21.00 and 08.00. Congress has also allowed consumers to register with a national do-not-call list, which launched in 2001. Additionally, telemarketers who break the restrictive laws can be sued for amounts ranging from $500-1,500 per occurrence. Informed consumers have taken advantage of this.
One of the telemarketing industry’s most controversial moves is to acquire cheap labor by installing call centers in prisons. A call center is the hub of a telemarketing company, essentially a bank of cubicles with phones, call lists, and scripts. TSRs or telephone service representatives man cubicles and place calls. In general, the public was not pleased to find that convicted murderers and rapists had been supplied with their names, telephone numbers, addresses and, in some cases, more extensive information – and called them at home to sell them.
Of the telemarketing companies that use convict labor, most are silent. Unions insist telemarketers are exploiting prison labor to avoid paying free Americans a fair wage. Telemarketers argue that they should outsource to countries like India to get cheap labor and that in-house labor is a cheap alternative. Inmates are reportedly paid around US$200 a month for a 40-hour week.
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