3 ms·

If you click a link, fill out a web form, send in a physical letter, or make a phone call and effectively say I want to get info on <product> and the company gi

If you click a link, fill out a web form, send in a physical letter, or make a phone call and effectively say I want to get info on <product> and the company gives your name to an affiliate who is a licensed professional to try to sell you <product> I don't think it counts as spam either. I wish your phone had a standardized way to link your expressed intent, the nature of the caller, and official nature/licensing or professional affiliation and show this data on your phone during receipt or during call kind of like you can click on an icon and get information about the legitimacy of a website. EG when you express the interest in <product> a singular number is created on your end and carried through to anyone who is actually acting such request whether it was asking someone to fix your cable or sell you life insurance and you could then verifiably see beyond caller idea and absolutely verifiable and relevant info in order to ascertain more data than is available via caller ID On September 2nd 2005 you told comcast their bad equipment was making you consider rage stomping said equipment. You are receiving a phone call from agent 34534 in the <country> who is officially employed by Comcast domain: xfinity.com to handle tech support regarding this issue. OR On December 10th 2012 you requested information re: life insurance from <Company>. You are receiving a call from <agent> who is a licensed insurance producer license #asdfasdf who has been an insurance producer for n years and has zero complaints regarding this request. It would be great if you could even address this request online via some standard like canceling it so nobody bugs you or attaching metadata

mindslight 3y ago
If someone fills out a web form looking for quotes, and that form pushes them into entering their phone number, and you use that number to call them instead of responding with an emailed quote, that is most certainly spam.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Insofar as I'm aware they literally expected to be contacted by a person. The majority haven't provided an email nor sufficient information that would allow anyone to reasonably provide anything beyond a table of values that they may or may not qualify for. I'd love to collect my own data and converse over email. I would be overjoyed in fact but I don't think people will put their personal medical history in a web page that isn't their doctors and I don't really blame them.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    My experience is the consumer side of home/auto/moving/storage with web pages promising online quotes, but are actually just leadgen funnels that hand off phone numbers to traditional high-touch sales processes. I'm sure the sales reps that receive those lists believe the targets actually want to be called, but that's obviously a convenient fiction with the way the web pages are set up. I've also gotten spam calls that are similar leadgen funnels, where the frontend is obviously robocall spam, and then you're transferred to sales reps at what is likely a different company who clearly expect to be speaking to bona fide interested customers rather than perturbed spam victims just looking to mess with them. In general I've got to question the impedance mismatch of turning a web form into a phone call regardless of whether it's necessary. To me they're much different head spaces, and just because evening/night me is preliminarily looking into a topic doesn't necessarily mean that daytime me wanted to add it to the in-process run queue. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of your rejection is based on this dynamic where people wanted the interaction/information at the time they requested it, but not later when you're interrupting them doing something else.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. I think the process of buying some products is inherently difficult because the space is very fragmented and there really isn't a lot of incentive to streamline the process.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      This is a good way to think about it. While I might be interested in the product, I’m not interested in the “high touch” sales experience, nor am I interested in doing it on someone else’s schedule. Those aspects of the process are the spam.

mindslight 3y ago

If someone fills out a web form looking for quotes, and that form pushes them into entering their phone number, and you use that number to call them instead of responding with an emailed quote, that is most certainly spam.

michaelmrose 3y ago
Insofar as I'm aware they literally expected to be contacted by a person. The majority haven't provided an email nor sufficient information that would allow anyone to reasonably provide anything beyond a table of values that they may or may not qualify for. I'd love to collect my own data and converse over email. I would be overjoyed in fact but I don't think people will put their personal medical history in a web page that isn't their doctors and I don't really blame them.
- mindslight 3y ago
  My experience is the consumer side of home/auto/moving/storage with web pages promising online quotes, but are actually just leadgen funnels that hand off phone numbers to traditional high-touch sales processes. I'm sure the sales reps that receive those lists believe the targets actually want to be called, but that's obviously a convenient fiction with the way the web pages are set up. I've also gotten spam calls that are similar leadgen funnels, where the frontend is obviously robocall spam, and then you're transferred to sales reps at what is likely a different company who clearly expect to be speaking to bona fide interested customers rather than perturbed spam victims just looking to mess with them. In general I've got to question the impedance mismatch of turning a web form into a phone call regardless of whether it's necessary. To me they're much different head spaces, and just because evening/night me is preliminarily looking into a topic doesn't necessarily mean that daytime me wanted to add it to the in-process run queue. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of your rejection is based on this dynamic where people wanted the interaction/information at the time they requested it, but not later when you're interrupting them doing something else.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I think the process of buying some products is inherently difficult because the space is very fragmented and there really isn't a lot of incentive to streamline the process.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    This is a good way to think about it. While I might be interested in the product, I’m not interested in the “high touch” sales experience, nor am I interested in doing it on someone else’s schedule. Those aspects of the process are the spam.