As the title of this post says, Free­tel are evil. I’m cur­rently too furi­ous to write a ratio­nal and rea­son­able post about it, with­out swear­ing, but I plan to edit this as soon as pos­si­ble to detail exactly how and why this is the case.

Later: Josh has calmed down, and com­mences writ­ing a rant about the issue. The long turn­around is because I was out last night/this morn­ing, not because I took that long to calm down. Still annoyed, though…

I read with some amuse­ment, mere min­utes after receiv­ing a phone call from Free­tel, a post on Slash­dot enti­tled “Spam Over Inter­net Tele­phony (SPIT) to Come?”, which points to an arti­cle by New­Sci­en­tist, “Move over spam, make way for “spit””. The sce­nario detailed in this arti­cle is one which I’m yet to expe­ri­ence in that form, as a by-product of my fail­ure to yet adopt VoIP tele­phony solu­tions, how­ever this kind of mar­ket­ing is hardly new.

Do you want to dis­cuss the cost-saving ben­e­fits of this over con­ven­tional tele­mar­ket­ing schemes? I’m sure that data is far cheaper in this day and age than the ridicu­lous “circuit-switched” (and you have to won­der how much of it is, any­more) pric­ing schemes of the telco organ­i­sa­tions around the world. Not in dis­pute. I’m also (fairly) sure that in most of the world, it’s cheaper to have a com­puter sit­ting there mak­ing phone calls, rather than a per­son. Addi­tion­ally, you’re just as likely to hit peo­ple suf­fi­ciently impul­sive and/or stu­pid enough to buy your prod­uct. Don’t believe me? A study released ear­lier this year revealed that unso­licited bulk email actu­ally WAS effec­tive, sim­ply because the returns only had to be min­i­mal to cover the even more min­i­mal cost. Peo­ple spam, peo­ple do tele­mar­ket­ing — There, case for VoIP marketing.

And what about a com­bi­na­tion of the two tech­nolo­gies? We all know frogs go… I mean… we all know that VoIP takeup in this con­ti­nent at least leaves a fair bit to be desired, so far as exten­sive tele­mar­ket­ing poten­tial audi­ences are con­cerned. And that said, those who have adopted here are most likely those who wouldn’t respond so well to tele­mar­ket­ing any­way — indeed, tele­mar­ket­ing may have been one of the rea­sons behind their mov­ing away from con­ven­tional tele­phony ser­vices, so they can use VoIP gate­ways to auto­mat­i­cally screen callers based on CID infor­ma­tion, and other things… I’m not going to go too geeky at this point, but it’s been dis­cussed at length in the past.

So, there’s no mar­ket worth touch­ing in VoIP mar­ket­ing in Aus­tralia as yet. That doesn’t mean Evil­Busi­nesses™ can’t cap­i­talise on the cost-cutting ben­e­fits of using com­put­ers to make phone calls, instead of peo­ple. Qovia, an Inter­net Appliance/VoIP mon­i­tor­ing equip­ment provider, has devel­oped a sys­tem to send out 1,000 calls every five sec­onds, accord­ing to this CNET News arti­cle. And they’re the good guys. (So, they’re not sell­ing that tech to any­one… big deal. Think con­cep­tu­ally, that’s far more important.)

There is a per­fectly legit­i­mate appli­ca­tion of this tech­nol­ogy, of course. My local library uses an auto­mated call­ing sys­tem to notify and remind mem­bers of over­due books, which is excel­lent. I’m sure that this could be applied in many other spheres, too — not the least of which is any size­able con­sul­ta­tion busi­ness, specif­i­cally think­ing of those in the med­ical field. Admin­is­tra­tion times could be cut, if calls were auto­mat­i­cally made to say “Good [time of day], [name]. [Busi­ness name] is call­ing to remind you of your appoint­ment tomor­row, [date], at [time]. If you believe this time is incor­rect, con­tact us on [call­back], or press [key num­ber] to speak to an operator.”

That’s a con­cept, of course, but one which could be very eas­ily and read­ily imple­mented (heck, for all I know, it prob­a­bly has been)… the point stands, there are “good” appli­ca­tions for this tech­nol­ogy, which I wouldn’t object to at all. That said, Free­tel aren’t apply­ing this in a “good” manner.

I don’t know if they’re using a VoIP/POTS gate­way, or what. More to the point, I don’t care. I’m vaguely curi­ous, but only because I have a vague ambi­tion of doing some­thing to break it. Tech­ni­cally, if I were really inter­ested, there are peo­ple I can speak to about how this stuff works… besides, Google has most of the answers, anyway.

A com­pany with whom I have had no pre­vi­ous asso­ci­a­tion or fore­knowl­edge of, Free­tel, called my land­line tele­phone num­ber (ADSL line) yes­ter­day after­noon. I don’t recall the exact details of the call, so to avoid accu­sa­tions of libel at a later time, the fol­low­ing ver­sion of events is that to the best of my rec­ol­lec­tion. I say this, because it was impos­si­ble for me to record the call in a more def­i­nite man­ner, by means of record­ing device, or man­ual tran­scrip­tion, see­ing I wasn’t expect­ing a phone call of this nature. So if you wish to sue, please, make my day. I haven’t got money for lawyers, but meh. Oh, I’m sorry, I pub­lished con­tent of a ques­tion­able nature on my per­sonal web­site, vis­ited by close friends and a few oth­ers. If it makes you feel any bet­ter, I would have prob­a­bly slan­dered your company’s good name to them in other per­sonal cor­re­spon­dence by the time you read this mes­sage. All good? Excel­lent. Continuing.

Upon answer­ing the phone, the man­ner and ambi­ent noise (or lack thereof) dis­tin­guished the caller instantly as a record­ing. So that was stu­pid. The voice-actor respon­si­ble per­formed poorly, and the post-work on the record­ing was equally unim­pres­sive; both should be shot. First sus­pi­cious ele­ment? I think one of the ear­li­est words spo­ken was “con­grat­u­la­tions”. I had, appar­ently, been selected as one of one-hundred (that num­ber I recall with clar­ity) lucky peo­ple in “my area” (what they define “my area” as remains unclar­i­fied… I tend to think “my area” may have been the one-hundred num­bers imme­di­ately above and below my own, but this is spec­u­la­tion) to receive this amaz­ing offer of FREE phone calls! Wow!

You have no idea how stoked I am at this point. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited by a tele­mar­keter. Now, maybe I’m just lucky, but I don’t think I’ve ever been hit with a tele­mar­ket­ing call which sounded this gen­uinely dodgy. For exam­ple, I’ve never been offered a free set of steak-knives, or any­thing else for that mat­ter, whilst on the phone. Pos­si­bly some­thing extra for no addi­tional cost, but cer­tainly not just out­right “free”. So that was stu­pid. The copy for this record­ing was poorly pre­pared, and the copy writer respon­si­ble should be shot.

I’m hold­ing the phone, still, although shak­ing some­what. I’ve realised, this is the first elec­tronic phone-spam I’ve ever received — far from being a his­toric moment, I’m furi­ous. This is not an expe­ri­ence I’d like to become com­mon­place, as I hold the tele­phony medium in some esteem for its’ direct, peer-to-peer nature, in which instant feed­back is pos­si­ble. I’m read­ing a book at the minute, enti­tled “Alpha­bet to Email”, by Naomi S. Baron, a Pro­fes­sor of Lin­guis­tics at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity. In it, she has a chap­ter enti­tled “Why the Jury’s Still Out on Email”, which begins with two quo­ta­tions, reading

It might help to con­sider the [email] mes­sage as a writ­ten ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion rather than real writ­ing.¹

[Com­puter con­fer­enc­ing is like] writ­ing let­ters which are mailed over the tele­phone.²

^1. Shapiro and Ander­son 1985:21
^2. Jim Girard, quoted in Spitzer 1986:19

I’d dis­agree. I think that approach­ing an elec­tronic medium such as email in that man­ner restricts it, and isn’t true to the sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences the medium holds to oth­ers — tele­phony being the per­ti­nent exam­ple here. The inside-cover recto page of this book con­tains an expanded blurb. Get this:

Many chil­dren who sel­dom spoke to their par­ents at home now com­mu­ni­cate with them through email.

Bang? At any rate, there are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between the two medi­ums, and, as far as I’m con­cerned, nei­ther of them encroaches on the space of the other. Tele­phony pro­vides poten­tial for imme­di­ate feed­back (at least, in the con­ven­tional approach taken to it), whilst email per­mits time for greater con­sid­er­a­tion and response. The liken­ing of email to “writ­ten ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion” is the result of narrow-minded peo­ple who have adapted to, rather than grown with, tech­nol­ogy, fail­ing to view it as being directly anal­o­gous with another medium, and thus draw­ing loose sim­i­lar­i­ties in bold lines, to make them­selves more com­forable with a “dif­fer­ent” media form. No, I haven’t got a degree in this stuff. Yes, I want one. In this instance, how­ever, I like to think that I’m right, and they’re con­fused. This isn’t Wagner’s mixed-up world of mag­nif­i­cently com­bined mul­ti­me­dia — I’m sorry. Medi­ums are sep­a­rate, and that’s how they’ll remain in some instances. They don’t have to be “the same” as what came before, not even sim­i­lar. Think out­side the square.

Yes, out­side the square. That’s what these computer-powered tele­mar­keters seem to be doing — apply­ing a medium proven effec­tive by mass appli­ca­tion, rather than rel­a­tive effec­tive­ness, and (the­o­ret­i­cally) ben­e­fit­ing from it.

Well, I’m sorry. That doesn’t appeal to me. You know what? If your prod­uct will fil­ter out voice-spam calls, then I’m happy. I’ll buy it… if it dis­plays value for money com­pared to what I’ve got already. Oh, yeah, and if your ini­tial con­tact isn’t so dodgy that I wouldn’t con­sider fol­low­ing it up to pur­chase. And if you think you do anti-evil-call fil­ter­ing, then wake up — you’re not Qovia (who, inci­den­tally, have already filed for patent on this one), so get over your­selves. Mean­while, I’ll just sit here, white-faced and shak­ing, every time I receive a phone call from a com­puter. But, you know what makes all of this worse? The sys­tem behind it was evi­dently poorly devel­oped, even from a user per­spec­tive. A few kilo­me­ters up this rather lengthy blog post, I dis­cussed the poten­tial of this tech­nol­ogy for appoint­ment reminders, using cus­tomis­able ele­ments as part of a voice-call macro.

Ide­ally, Free­tel would have utilised a sim­i­lar method, such that when the phone num­ber was skimmed from a data­base (pre­sum­ably from White Pages/Tel­stra/Sen­sis’ direc­tory on CD, or sim­i­lar), the name was also recorded. Hence, it would be pos­si­ble to ini­ti­ate the call with “Good [time of day], [gen­der title] [last name]. I am call­ing from a tele­mar­ket­ing sc… erm… Freetel” — note that not even a time-greeting was included.

The rea­son I’m com­ment­ing on this at all is not sim­ply because I believe it’d make the sys­tem more per­son­able, but because they’ve failed so mis­er­ably at mak­ing any attempt to do so. Exam­ple? Okay. The first stage of the record­ing con­cludes, and the user is given a sin­gle prompt. Yes, that’s right. It’s per­fectly lin­ear — there is no alter­na­tive, but to hang up; some­thing that peo­ple may do at any time of their own voli­tion even with­out prompt­ing — and yet the user is still pre­sented with a “choice”. The prompt goes some­thing like “Press 1 to find out how to take advan­tage of this amaz­ing offer.”, and then a record­ing gives a mes­sage. From a usabil­ity point, this is stu­pid. This has been dis­cussed (on Web Stan­dards Group, amongst other places) more than a few times with peo­ple who deal with human/machine inter­ac­tion sys­tems, and the con­clu­sion we always seem to wind up at is that pro­gram­mers don’t give users enough credit, in most instances. This doesn’t mean don’t code sys­tems with­out usabil­ity in mind, but it does mean you needn’t put in extra point­less steps to “explain” things to users. So, the human inter­ac­tion spe­cial­ists should be shot.

After this mes­sage, the user is told to leave their name and phone num­ber after the tone. In hind­sight, I wish I’d left a longer mes­sage — I said some­thing along the lines of “Hi, I’m the per­son you just called. Go jump.” Now, regard­less as to the call cost, I was tying up a POTS line some­where… that’s one less other call they could be mak­ing at that time. I was suf­fi­ciently abu­sive, I think, but in ret­ro­spect I’m wish­ing I had left my name and web­site address… as it stands, I’m going to have to now chase them up, find con­tact num­bers, and then point them in the direc­tion of this post. If you’re read­ing this, hi guys… you should be shot.

Tags: ADSL, American University, australia, by-product, circuit-switched, conventional telephony services, copy writer, Google, human/machine interaction systems, Internet Appliance/VoIP monitoring equipment, Internet Telephony, IP telephony, Jim Girard, landline, Naomi S. Baron, Professor of Linguistics, Qovia, telemarketer, telephony, telephony medium, telephony solutions, Telstra, two technologies, voice-actor, VOIP, Web Standards Group