Dear Resort: Phone Spamming + Wasting My Time = Fail!

I’m annoyed again by a telemarketer.

I actually am not annoyed at the telemarketer, I’m annoyed at the company who told her it was a good idea to market their resort like this.

I just got a phone call and right off the bat they asked for the wrong person. Obviously it’s a total sales call when they ask for someone else, you say wrong number, but they proceed to offer you something anyway.

So, Ms. Telemarketer says she has a special offer of $89 for three nights at a Resort in Collingwood. I am slightly interested so I say I’ll check out the website. Ms. Telemarketer gives me the site address (which I’ve already looked up using the company name).

The nice lady (and she really was friendly and nice) proceeds to tell me that she just needs to ask me a few questions to make sure I qualify.

Ok, whatever.

She asked me a few questions, not many at all. Here’s what I can remember:

These were all asked within ranges, I guess to portray the illusion of caring about my privacy.

I don’t know why I even answered that stuff. It’s personal info and if you want to make an offer to me, make it, don’t ask me to do your customer targeting for you!

Anyway, Ms. Telemarketer says she’s putting the results into the computer (okay..) and we had to wait a little minute. Then she tells me: oh it didn’t get approved. Something about she doesn’t know why and it happens often.

Then she asks something to the effect of: Can we call you another time with other offers that match with your results?!

At that point I think I should have been mad, but honestly the lady was just so nice sounding all I said was: No I’ll just check out the website.

I’m sure it came down to my income. I mean the rest of it was just filler so they could target people with a specific income range. I mean I’m not stupid. Irritated? Yes. Stupid? No.

Ok, there are so many things wrong with this scenario from a potential customer standpoint:

1. You waste five minutes of my time to telemarket (spam) to me and then you tell me I’M NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BUY YOUR STUFF!

2. You ask me if you can call me back after telling me I’m not good enough to BUY YOUR STUFF!

3. You told me this happens a lot, so not only are you annoying me but a lot of other potential happy customers. You know what happy customers do? Well I know what they don’t do – rant on their blogs about you.

4. It’s not bad enough you want to sell me unsolicited ‘offers’, but you also are asking me to self-identify so you can pinpoint your unsolicited offer – yuck!

So I’m at a bit of a dilemma. I wrote this post originally with the company name in the title but then I did a google search and found I’ll likely get right onto the front page of listing for their company name if I do so.

I’m so nice (and also a bit cautious) I don’t want to publicly bash them. I’m just annoyed and while I would like to tell the company my feedback in a productive way I’m not sure if announcing it here is where I should do it. I’m pretty sure I’ll just let this be my rant and leave it at that.

What do you think? Would you ‘out’ them on your blog?

p.s. Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog to get future telemarketer rants like the one above and this one. Plus, I write about lots of useful online biz stuff too!