Slate's Bizbox
diary: A weeklong electronic journal.

diary
entries
12

Entry 2

Posted Tuesday, May 7, 2002, at 8:08 PM ET

Francisco Guerrero is a telemarketing operations manager at MCI WorldCom.


More photos from Francisco Guerrero

This is Francisco Guerrero's last "Diary" entry because he is unable to continue without his company's approval.

The morning has been a slow start to the week. Today I listened to our reps calling customers. I've been listening to two or three very perky reps going through the motions and reading their scripts with people on the phone. My monitoring sessions are few and far between, as I only listen when we have some specific data concerns, such as lots of records with wrong addresses or wrong phone numbers. My job is to make sure the data is clean and accurate. Today, to quote Yogi Berra, "it's déjà vu all over again" as I listen to these calls. I remember my early days behind the telemarketing desk. While not a lot of my co-workers have worked in the field, I have, so I am painfully aware of what it means when you call for a seven-hour shift and have only one sale to show for it. Before I got promoted to my current job, I was pitching over the phone as a part-time telemarketer. I was never a "star" salesperson—I had average numbers for my five months behind the lines. It was a bit stressful for me. I guess this is a business that demands that you have a thick skin, a perky attitude no matter what, and know how to handle rejection in massive loads.

Most of the morning calls reach people such as housewives, maids, babysitters, and other people staying at home at 11:30 a.m. on a weekday. Whenever our reps talk to such people, they cannot make a sale as they have to reach the decision maker. The reps are told to call back "in the evening, after 6 p.m.," which explains a lot of the lousy timing when calling happens in the middle of dinner. We were told to call in the evening, and that's how it happens. When the monitoring sessions are completed, the "monitors" analyze the performance of the calls listened to. It has the feeling of Monday Night Football analysis. A lot of what each rep said, should've said, or shouldn't have said is carefully dissected and debated. Each word is weighed carefully. The tone of voice is evaluated. This is internal calling, which makes the analysis better and less stressful. If telemarketing was only irritating and completely ineffective, then there wouldn't be a business behind it. People tend to forget that the reason that telemarketing is so prevalent is that it's profitable. There are people on the other side of the line who will buy, so, evidently, not everyone is upset at the dinner interruptions. A human voice still sells better than the printed word, a TV commercial, or a pop-up ad.

My messy desk

The rest of the afternoon is full of meetings. One after another in a never-ending wave of meetings and deadlines. Our direct-mail meetings are always that give-and-take between marketing visions and tough, financial reality. I spend as much time in meeting rooms as I do at my desk.

By the end of the afternoon, my desk is covered with papers; the most important ones get a place on a spot in one of my cube walls, while the others sit in piles in my desk. I am a terrible organizer; I resist filing because I know that If I don't see a particular piece of paper, I will forget that project. Memo to myself: Get a PDA soon.

diary
entries
12

Entry 2

Posted Tuesday, May 7, 2002, at 8:08 PM ET
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Francisco Guerrero is a telemarketing operations manager at MCI WorldCom.
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