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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! |
As I promised in my blogpost It's not even 7am, but I'm calling to remind you that your software license needs to be renewed
here's the wonderfully cogent letter I wrote to this company. I have changed the names, since I love this company.
To: Tom@Pretty-Good-Software.com
From: Garnet R Chaney
Time: August 6, 20008 7:50am
Subject: RE: Voicemail follow up
Tom,
I need a small favor, and I hope you can help. I received a call this morning before 7am reminding me of my Pretty-Good-Software renewal. Unless there was a daylight savings change last night and I forgot to move my watch ahead by two hours, calls at this hour are entirely inappropriate. Please help me make sure the following complaint reaches the proper ears, which would at least be your VP of Sales. I'd hate to see you guys lose more sales by generating ill will as has happened below, or even worse have someone making complaints with officials or lawyers against Pretty-Good-Software's telemarketing. From my in-depth study of the laws around telemarketing, pre 8am sales calls can be a cause for legal action. Thanks....
Jolie,
Was it you who I just received a call and a voicemail from at 6:50am, from 408-POP-CORN? I believe the call was from an Jolie, and it was about my Pretty-Good-Software renewal. If it was not from you, I'll listen again to the voice mail and get the right name, I apologize in advance. I have already called that number, was forwarded to voicemail, and left a message of complaint. However, if it was from you, please listen very carefully!
The number I have given Pretty-Good-Software is my personal cell phone number. I would expect that calls before 7am are of an emergency nature, and when I saw I'd missed a call from a 408 number I didn't recognize, I assumed it was a new number for Really-Big-Software's network center notifying me of an emergency outage of their instance of your Conglomeration software, which I manage for them.
I am a typical programmer, and was up until 1am last night considering how to make Adobe's Flex/Air technology talk to Pretty-Good-Software's Conglomeration product. At this hour of the morning I am normally sleeping! But seeing the number, thinking it might be an "emergency" at this hour, I roust myself to check my voice mail, listen through two other neglected voicemails to get to the emergency message. When I find it was just a sales reminder, I was flabbergasted!
While I appreciate your eagerness to reach your sales targets, and your eagerness to help Pretty-Good-Software grow, violating the laws, and just normal telephone etiquette, is not the way to do it! While I appreciate you are probably working flex hours, and from home, and I support such arrangements, there might be some issues below that need to be considered.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I have only consulted with law firms and done legal analysis and written declarations and interrogatories and dealt with discovery issues in complex dotcom class action cases. As a hobby, I have closely studied the various laws covering telemarketers, including the two main laws, the FCC's Telephone Consumer Protection Act, (TCPA), and the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), associated with the donotcall.gov registry. You can easily find that I have written a number of blog articles, and even entire websites, on this subject. While what follows is not legal advice, I believe it is well founded. Since you are doing telemarketing, I especially encourage you and your managers to study the laws for yourself, and if you have any questions, please get competent legal advice. I might suggest Ira Rothken, of http://www.techfirm.com as a very competent lawyer well versed in dot-com law issues.
Here are some concerns I have for Pretty-Good-Software over your telephone contact before 7am this morning:
- Since I have a previous business relationship with Pretty-Good-Software, where I am a paying customer, you do have a right to call me.
- I can revoke such right at any time by giving Pretty-Good-Software notice. You then no longer have the right to call me, and I can begin filing suit in small claims court for $500 for each subsequent unwanted sales call. The authority for such suit is the TCPA.
- The TSR requires that telemarketers scrub their phone lists against the do not call registry on a quarterly basis. This requires payment of a fee per area code in order to check your numbers against the list.
- This probably only applies to phone calls to people who are not Pretty-Good-Software customers.
- Whether someone signing up for a free trial creates the same business relationship allows you to telemarket them even if their number is registered with the donotcall.gov registry, I can not legally determine, but it seems risky to me.
- The TSR sets limits on the hours when any sales call can be made. I believe the limits are 9am to 9pm, but it might start as early as 8am. There may also be state rules on this issue. I don't believe there is an exception for a prior business relationship to allow telemarketing calls outside those hours.
- California has additional rules against the use of robot calling devices (which doesn't apply since you are using humans to do the calls.) Other states may have similar rules.
- The TSR requires that all outbound sales calls include proper caller ID. Making sales calls from a blocked number is a big no-no as of February a couple of years ago (this provision took effect a few months after the TSR was passed into law).
- Making sales calls from a personal phone line not identified as "Pretty-Good-Software software" is a risk for a number of reasons.
- It probably creates personal liability for mistakes in following the laws.
- It is not professional.
- You may not want to be sharing your personal number with your customers
- If I had answered the phone in time, would you have been ready to take my credit card number to pay for my renewal? It would have been really stupid of anyone to give their credit card number to you, since they have no way from the caller id to really tell if the caller was really with Pretty-Good-Software software or was someone else. Various government websites have all kinds of security advisories posted about this common method of credit card fraud, and advising people receiving marketing calls to be very sure who has called them before they give out any sensitive information.
- For years I have been lecturing, and blogging, about very big companies and their "your payment is late" divisions making their phone calls without proper caller id. They get an earful everytime they call me from numbers not clearly identified as the company they are calling from. But in general, I tell them I have a policy not to give out my financial info to inbound callers, may I instead use their website to contact them and make the requested payment. Only recently have they begun to accept that response! Some still try to insist either I pay them on that very phone call, or else!
- Perhaps you should have a Voip phone you can use from home, whose outbound caller ID could be set to an Pretty-Good-Software number. Given the ease of setting such up, d) above probably still applies to whether you will be successful in getting anyone's credit card information. But if the outbound number shown on caller ID was one publicly shown on your website as a sales contact number, it could help.
I hope the above points help improve your sales, and help you avoid the not inconsequential pitfalls and landmines that are out there to give lawyers more work, and telemarketers a lot of grief.
I know some sales books say the best time to get through to decision makers is to call them early in the morning. If your urgent 6:50am call was to tell me that I'd qualified for a free one year extension to my license, I would be pleased as punch, and for that you can call me any hour of the night or day.
Otherwise, I don't know too many decision makers who would be pleased with being awakened before 8am to be reminded to spend hundreds of dollars. You might also consider the effects of awakening the spouses of decision makers with your renewal reminders. Again, a free extension would probably be the only way to avoid a negative impression from awakening the spouses at such an hour.
Good luck with your sales/renewal campaign.
P.S. You're a winner of my daily "Who wants to be a Garnet blog topic" award: http://www.bobsgear.com/x/4YAtAQ I was kind enough to change the names....
