Home improvement telemarketer bonds with a robot programmed to talk to him

I know I’ve said this before, but this might be my favorite call so far. I build robots to talk to telemarketers and the calls are often funny, entertaining, or informative. But this one is different from the others. You must listen.

This is a call from a “home construction” telemarketer that will help you with home improvements. I think of these guys as scammers. They just try to collect a lead and sell it to a contractor. He mentions the local town a couple times and even a street name. I think he just pretends to be local. These guys can get clever by faking the caller-id to something local and then mentioning a large street name. It’s just one more piece of “the confidence game” that they pull on you.

So this telemarketer talks to a robot for over ten minutes and completely bonds with her. They chat about puppies, first-aid, smoking, etc. This guy has lots in common with this bot and he really enjoys the conversation. Just a few minutes into the call, he says that it’s the longest conversation he’s had all day and that most people are really rude. His shift ends in 20 minutes and this bot manages to keep him on the line long enough that hopefully he doesn’t make any more calls. I don’t want him calling you or anyone you know. I want him and all of his colleagues to talk to my bots and leave everyone else alone!

At the end of the call, he tells the bot that she is awesome and that her husband is a really lucky guy.

I know it’s fun when the telemarketers get mad, but this is a call where EVERYBODY WINS – even the telemarketer. The only loser here is the telemarketer’s employer, which is the best revenge of all. Hey, telemarketing firm – your employees might be talking to bots and they don’t know or care!

As I listen a couple times during editing, it strikes me that I might be naive and he knows it’s a bot. Even if this is the case, this bot performed as designed and kept him from calling anyone else. If he did figure out that something was odd, he must have gone through a transition of “person messing with me” and maybe to “oh it’s a robot”. What do you think?

Please consider subscribing to the Jolly Roger Telephone service. It’s only $6 per year and you get unlimited use of these bots for your telemarketers. At the end of the call, you get the recording emailed to you.

Thanks everyone for listening to this call!

Roger