Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Telephone Solicitors as High-Tech Parasites
By Gail Heriot

One more point on telephone solicitations: In addition to the the evolution of etiquette in dealing with telephone solicitors, there is the related evolution of technology to consider. Sure, most of us have learn over the past couple of decades to say no and to get rid of unwanted telephone calls with dispatch. Nobody in his right mind would think ill of a person who declines to engage a telephone solicitor in the kind of pleasant banter that is prelude to the solicitor's sales pitch (though I might think ill of a customer who is similarly abrupt towards a clerk in a department store). But technology has come to our rescue also. Old-fashioned answering machines allowed us to screen calls by simply listening for the caller to identify himself before deciding whether to take the call. More modern caller id and call screening services make it even easier. These innovations alone would probably have sealed the fate of the telephone solicitation industry had it not fought back.

Unfortunately, two can play at the game of technological evolution. Like a parasite, the telephone solcitation industry has had to adapt to changes in the public's behavior with a few changes of its own. In the old days, each solicitor had to dial each number by hand. Such a technology would never work today, since so many people are, through one technology or another, screening their calls. It's just not cost effective. Then came automatic dialers that saved a little time, but still allowed the solicitor to deal with only one call at a time. Today, these solicitors can handle several calls at the same time and attend only to the comparatively rare call that is answered by a live prospect. When the number of calls a solicitor can handle in a day rises exponentially, it doesn't matter that the yield (that is the number of actual sales per 100 calls) has declined significantly.

Maybe Mike is right that I am overly optimistic to suppose that this evolutionary arms race is going to wind down and that the telephone solicitation industry is doomed. It is certainly true that the industry's litigation against the "Do Not Call" list shows that it has no intention of going quietly into that good night. Still my instinct is that one way or another it is about to go the way of small pox. I would give it more thought but my telephone is ringing off the hook, so I'd better go deal with it ...
posted by Gail at 10/12/2003 01:40:00 PM