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I work for an outbound call center. We mainly call people who have previously donated to our charity and tell them about our current campaign and ask if they would be interested in donating again. We get a lot of very rude donors, but this one was a bit more intense.
So tonight I called this woman who had donated a year or two ago and when she picked up, I simply said “Hello”. And before I had a chance to even ask if I was speaking with the right person or introduce myself, I was met with her yelling over the phone. Her exact words were “F*CK RIGHT OFF AND DO NOT CALL AGAIN OR I WILL CALL THE COPS.” And then she hung up.
Bearing in mind I work for a charity, we call roughly every 3 months and if someone doesn’t pick up, we try again up to a maximum of 5 times, each time at least 2 days apart, before they go back into our 3 month call cycle. If they pick up and tell us they don’t want to donate, we tick “not interested” and they won’t get another call for 3 months. It is also worth noting that, in New Zealand, if you ask us to take you off our calling list, we are legally required to do so and you will never hear from us again.
What gets me is that she had no idea who I was and I had not called her before (we each have our own separate work number to call from). And rather than simply asking us to stop calling, she immediately threatened to call the cops… Without even knowing the name of the person calling her…
I’m assuming she was being harassed by another person who was calling her repeatedly. But still, you’d think she would notice it was a different number or a different voice.
I told my supervisor so he could handle it and removed her from our calling list. Believe it or not, people have called the police on our call centre before. I really don’t know what they expect the cops to do since it’s not illegal for a registered charity to call people.
But yeah, that threw me for a few minutes because it was so wild and unexpected.
The joys of outbound calling.
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