Most people I know get their fair share of bad telemarketing calls, the ones that are made by

• Some ill-prepared soul who telephones you to sell you a product or service about which they know only the very rudiments and haven’t really a clue as to how it could be of value to you.
• Someone reading from a script and expecting you to patiently wait until they have delivered their “pitch” before you can get a word in!
• The pressurised, hard sell individual who implies, and sometimes actually says, that if you don’t take advantage of this offer immediately then you’re an absolute fool and you deserve to fail.
• Someone who doesn’t realise that the few seconds delay between you answering the call and them speaking to you is a dead give away that it’s a foreign call centre – confirmed fairly swiftly by them (usually) having problems with the pronunciation of your name that has just popped up on a screen in front of them.
• And what about that little gem in consumer marketing whereby a pre-recorded message is played to you as soon as you answer the incoming call? The purpose of this type of telemarketing appears to be to inform you that you’ve won something and get you to call a premium ‘phone line to find out more…

Having recently slammed a call centre that particularly bugged me, what I’d really like to hear about are good calls that you’ve received and what, in your opinion made it a good call.

Please help me bolster my faith that the good telemarketing call is not an endangered species!