How would you like to receive a call at 6:50am reminding you that your software license had expired, and would you like to pay hundreds of dollars to renew it?
The extreme lack of common sense in some companies is legendary!
If you're like me, (especially if you're a programmer like me who is up until 1am or later working on cool programming ideas), you're probably up late at night, and the last thing you want before 7am is someone calling you to remind you of an email they sent you a week ago asking you to spend hundreds of dollars on a software license renewal. Especially if it is a piece of software that you were carefully considering whether it really meets your needs, or if you should replace it with other alternatives.
When I get a call before 7am, from a number that I don't recognize, but from an area code I do recognize as belonging to one of my clients, for whom I manage one of the world's largest in-house engineering wikis, I assume it must me the worst kind of emergency. Uh oh, maybe it was their network monitoring center, there must be a system down event, thousands of insomniac engineers unable to edit their wiki page. I didn't grab the phone in time, so by the time I got to my phone, and saw the number I didn't know with an area code I did know, the adrenaline starts flowing and I wake myself up enough to check through my voicemails to get to the emergency call. Imagine my shock and amazement at finding it was just a sales reminder!
I normally have enough courtesy not to wake other people up at 6:54am. (Unless it is a system down event, and I have no choice, or I want a software vendor to experience the pain of my having to be up at that hour supporting their crashed software.) In this case however, making a callback seemed appropriate to this perky sales person. Of course, all I got was her voicemail, doubtless she was busily leaving other reminders for others at that hour. I find it hard to believe that she got up before 7am with a short list of only my name on it.
Unlike my usual articles blasting the practices of clueless telemarketers, I'm not going to expose the name of this company because I love this company and am a big fan of their products. (Unfortunately my friends will know who I am talking about, I'm not a big fan of many companies. Clue though: It wasn't Sprint, it wasn't Verizon. My friends are now rolling on the floor laughing, they still talk at dinner parties about my Nikita Kruschev pounding shoe on the desk impression while talking to telephone companies).
Hoping you're sleeping at this hour, rather than blogging about a sales call you just received....
- Read the follow up email I sent them in... Advice to a telemarketer who thinks that calls to customers before 7am are just fine