I was recently called by a telemarketer who was seemingly on a
predictive dialer system, given the fact that I had to say "hello"
twice before being connected to someone.
I put the telemarketer on speakerphone, and once he was well involved
in the sales pitch, I walked away to do something else and left him to
make his pitch to an empty room. Eventually, I could hear him calling
out my name and then ending the call after realizing that he was
talking to no one.
However, upon returning to the phone, it seemed as if the call had not
really been disconnected. There was just dead air between intermittent
clicking sounds.
What was I connected to at that point (the predictive dialer?) and
what was behind the clicking sounds? And will this show up on the
telemarketer's phone bill or in their productivity stats as an
unusually long call?
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is just IMO, but if I understand
predictive dialers, they are 'in charge' of the call; you are just a
party to the call, the same as the telemarketer, but YOU are the
'most important' party; as long as YOU stay on the line, the
predictive dialer will not disconnect. The 'clicks' you hear are the
components of the predictive dialer attempting to 'test the line' for
busy, meaning is it in use or not. It does not hear dial tone,
therefore the line must be busy and it goes to some other port and
tries that one instead. Depending on how many telemarketers work at
that shop, chances are the predictive dialer has two or three more
ports available to it (than employees on duty), so that it can keep
on trying to stay even with (if not slightly ahead of) the number of
telemarketers on duty. If you dialed in directly to a telemarketer's
outgoing line you'd always hear that dead silence and occassional
'clicking' as it tried to find an outgoing line to use for a telemark-
eter's outgoing call. I suppose that if you dialed in on (or were
called by) enough telemarketers at the same shop, and you tried this
with enough of them, very soon they'd all be sitting around with no
calls to make. Your abandoning of the call off hook did nof affect the
individual telemarketer's record all that much. He just eventually
disconnected and the computer/predictive dialer simply connected him
to a new call (although using a different outgoing line, of course,
since you still had the one line off hook and busied out. I suppose
it would show up as an exceptionally long call for the overall phone
system however. PAT]
KM (mcdougak@mts.net)