The Willow Glen Resident

Locals fight the good fight against telephone solicitors

Marketers actually fund a service that can cut down on dinnertime calls

By Michelle Ku

Without fail, as the family sits down for dinner each evening, the telephone rings, and the caller is unwanted. Welcome to the world of telemarketing.

Every day, Willow Glen residents are among the thousands of people throughout the country who receive phone calls from telephone marketers pushing one product or another. Yet it's easier to be removed from telemarketing lists than one might think.

Ever since Cindy Gasporavic refinanced her home recently, she has been inundated with telemarketing calls. "I had always gotten a lot of stuff in the mail and on the phone," Gasporavic said. "All of a sudden it really picked up. I got like 20 calls a week on my company line as well as my home line."

Gasporavic received telemarketing calls for magazine subscriptions, credit cards, time shares on various property, long-distance telephone companies and even mortgage brokers.

The last straw came when she got a call from a Chase Manhattan representative at 10:57 p.m. one night. "It's unbelievable," Gasporavic says. "They would call usually right around the dinner hour. ... I was just livid."

"A lot of people actually respond to telemarketers," said Chet Dalzell, a spokesperson for Direct Marketing Association, a not-for-profit trade organization that runs a service--funded by telemarketers--that can reduce the number of unwanted calls.

"Consumers spend $164 billion every year responding to marketers who call them," Dalzell said. "That figure is so large because some of the top products sold through telemarketing are renewing magazine subscriptions and cheaper rates on credit cards and on long-distance services."

Leslie TenBoer of Willow Glen also expressed frustration about unwanted solicitation calls. Due to the number of calls she receives, her family does not answer the phone during the dinner hour and often lets the answering machine pick up calls.

"When the machine gets it, the people I know will say, 'I know you're there. I know you're there.' But if it's a solicitor, they'll hang up without leaving a message," TenBoer said.

But people who receive unwanted and unsolicited telemarketing calls do not have to hide behind their answering machines. Telemarketers have developed a service to help them focus their calling base and to remove people who do not want to be called from their lists.

"The marketers are behind this because they don't want to call people who don't want to be called," Dalzell said. "It saves them time, money, resources and the potential of alienating a future customer."

One such service is the Telephone Preference Service maintained by Direct Marketing Association. The service is a list of customers who have requested not to receive calls at their homes. Within 90 days of their requesting to be removed from marketing lists, customers should see a drop in the number of calls. While the Telephone Preference Service screens out most national calls, local charities may still call.

The Telephone Preference Service issues an annual list of people who do not want to be called to about 4,000 national telemarketers who pay for the service. The telemarketers receive quarterly list updates. Names on the Telephone Preference Service are kept on file for five years.

By law, marketers are required to put a person's name and phone number on a "Do Not Call" or "Do Not Mail" list if the person requests it.

"Everybody who does call to solicit, we ask to be taken off their list," TenBoer said. "You can hear the disappointment in their voices, but they do say they will take us off."

If a request is not honored, people can file complaints with the Federal Communication and Federal Trade commissions. The FCC and the FTC will not investigate on the basis of a single complaint, but they may if there are several complaints, Dalzell said.

Telemarketers receive names and numbers of potential customers from a variety of sources. Magazines, credit card companies and credit bureaus are just a few of the businesses that often sell lists of their customers to marketing groups, Dalzell said.

Gasporavic discovered that Chase Manhattan received her number from JC Penney, which got her number from a telemarketing company. Some major credit bureaus can legally sell people's information to such companies, Gasporavic said.

"I was appalled by it," she said. "I think it's an invasion of your privacy. [Telemarketers] had all this information about me that I did not like, plus ... some people send you something ahead of time and then call you later."

To limit the availability of personal information being shared with or sold to a marketer, Dalzell suggests that customers ask companies they do business with to not share information with a marketer. "But some databases are compiled from records that are public, such as a phone directory," Dalzell said.

It's been about four weeks since Gasporavic requested to be put on the "Do Not Call" list, and she's noticed a difference in the number of calls. But she's also been requesting that telemarketers take her off their list when they've called over the last two months.

How to get on the list

To be placed on the Telephone Preference Service, write to Telephone Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 9014, Farmingdale, NY, 11735-9014. The association also runs the Mail Preference Service, which screens out national marketing mail. To be placed on the mail list, write a letter to Mail Preference Service, c/o Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 9008, Farmingdale, NY 11735-9008.

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