July 7, 3:10pm EDT: Inbound telephone call from what must have been a monster.com call center or telemarketing vendor since the area code shown on caller ID was Broward County, Florida, not global HQ in NY nor the local (Maynard Mass.) office. Caller wondered about my business recruiting needs, was getting ready to do the pitch for monster. Fair enough. Everybody has to make a living.
Except:
I currently have an ad running on monster.com for a marketing/pr assistant. Which my caller did not know. Hmmm…..
Now to be fair, we do have two businesses operating from our lovely Hudson headquarters, GetGood Strategic Marketing and my husband’s computer consulting business, Active Oak LLC. We share the phone number, which was of course in the ad listing 🙂
The monster.com telemarketer had to dial my number somehow, but even if it was a call list generated using a random number generator versus a directory, there is really no excuse, in my mind, for failing to check the numbers against the monster client list. Especially current advertisers 🙂
All that said, I am extremely happy with the responses to my ad, and am willing to forgive monster this slight lapse in business acumen. But…. were it a service that I was less happy with, and I got an equally clueless telemarketing call, I would be far less likely to let it go.
Lesson: if you are doing outbound prospecting or even customer service calling, you should be using an enterprisewide CRM. There is no excuse for a telemarketer not knowing someone they are calling is already a customer.
My .02
YMMV
Tags: customer service, CRM, marketing, telemarketing
