I’ve started to get cold calls from phone dealerships offering me free upgrades for my mobile phone. Currently I’m getting two or three of them a week.
The pattern is always the same. They claim to be calling from an “Orange dealership”[1] and ask if I’m happy with my current phone. When I ask where they got my number from they always claim that they got it from Orange. But they never have any more details of my account. They rapidly lose interest when they discover that I last upgraded my phone just a few months ago as this means that I’m still in my twelve month Orange contract and there’s no way that I’m eligible for a free upgrade.
There’s also no way that Orange would share my number (or anyone’s number) with another phone dealership. Orange like me to get my phones from them. Actually, perhaps that’s not true. When I last upgraded my phone Orange made it very clear that they weren’t happy with the small amounts I spend each month and they made it as hard as possible for me to get a free upgrade. Perhaps they would like to shift that cost onto anoter dealership.
Oh, and this number is registered with the Telephone Prefence Society which means that in theory I shouldn’t get any cold calls like this. When I challenge them on that they always claim that because they are “connected with Orange” then it’s not a cold call. Which is clearly nonsense.
It’s hard to see how this kind of marketing is cost effective. Unlike spam, there are large costs associated with it. You need to pay someone to make the calls. And you need to pay for the calls themselves. Obviously they will only continue doing this if it’s cost effective. Which means that some people must be responding to these calls. But who could that be? Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about it is really annoyed by these calls. What idiots are welcoming them?
[1] Orange are the mobile phone company that I use.
One of my friends used to have this exact same problem and it turned out that these companies were actually getting a list of people from Orange. He told every company that phoned him (sometimes 3 a day) to remove him from their lists and phoned Orange – eventually he got them to take him off the lists they send to resellers – this eventually cut out almost all the calls.
i might aswell put my hand up and say that im not proud because ive worked for an orange dealership and left last week (thank god). There are dozens of orange dealerships across the country, they are just simply small call centres who DO get a great mass of numbers FROM orange themselves. Orange tend to say to customers that they dont employ dealerships which is crap because they honestly and truely do, you can only identify true ornage dealerships with their ‘connecter code’ which is a 6 digit code that identifies them as a orange upgrade/promotions specialists. i agree its annoying. And the only information these orange dealerships have are the numbers, they can only get hold of the account holders information if the holder gives it to them i.e. to check eligibility on orange upgrades.the aim of the dealerships themselves is just basically to make sales, commission from the phones they sell .. only that. So orange gets to keep hold of their customers who are willing to go ahead with the new contract/promotion that the dealership is offering them. Basic marketing scheme .. and it works unfortunately.