Telemarketers Find a Whole New Way to Be Annoying Pam Kraft thought it was her ex-husband who was calling all the time and hanging up. The divorce, after all, had been messy. 'I thought it was him,' she says. 'I felt threatened.' But it wasn't him. Kraft's real stalkers, it turned out, were telemarketers using one of the more irksome tools of their trade, predictive dialers. Predictive dialers are machines that calculate how many numbers to dial to avoid dead time. They weed out busy signals and answering machines, and let the human telemarketer tune in to real-live customers. Predictive dialers have been great for telemarketers, nearly doubling their productivity. Instead of dialing 45 numbers an hour, an operator can now dial 80. Telemarketers sold $186 billion of stuff last year, 38% more than they sold five years ago, according to the Direct Marketing Association. But what's great for telemarketers has an unerring ability to drive everyone else completely insane. Often the dialers 'predict' incorrectly, and more people than expected pick up their phones. The dogged little machines used to spew a recorded spiel when this happened, but Congress outlawed that. So now the predictive dialers either hang up or leave the hapless consumer waiting in silence for the operator to pick up. Most people who get such calls, like Pam Kraft, don't realize their phone nemesis is a telemarketer; they often blame some real or phantom person in their life. Spouses get suspicious. Old folks get scared. Real stalking victims get downright petrified. 'They are just as fearful of a hang-up from a telemarketing call as from a stalker. The effect is exactly the same,' says one victim's advocate. 'My reps spend a good portion of their day explaining what predictive dialers do,' says Juanita Abbott, who manages a regional annoyance-call bureau for Bell Atlantic. 'The calls run the gamut. People say, 'I know it's my neighbor because I parked my car too close.' They think the worst.' Trade groups say the industry tries to keep the number of abandoned calls to around 1% or 2% of total calls. (And this industry makes a lot of calls: FORTUNE estimates that 40% of telemarketers use predictive dialers, which means the industry can dial 141 million numbers a day, or 5.5% of U.S. call volume.) EIS, one maker of the dialers, surveyed customers and found the abandoned-call rate to be closer to 3%. Consumer-advocate groups say the hang-up rate can reach as high as 10%. But even a 1% rate translates to around 768,000 a day, and that's not counting all the times predictive dialers hang up on answering machines. The stalked are fighting back. Some have sued telemarketers; others join the 1.9 million people on the DMA's Do Not Call list, which has swelled 36.2% this year. (To join the list, write to Telephone Preference Service, DMA, P.O. Box 9014, Farmingdale, N.Y. 11735.) A few industry leaders are advising their brethren to keep the abandon rates low or risk regulation. Maryland, Minnesota, and New Jersey have already considered such laws. But maybe the problem isn't too many abandoned calls, but rather that they're made in the first place. How long would, say, UPS stay in business if it played ding-dong-ditch on 3% of its customers? The END ************************* LB 59
