In France it is important not to actually answer the phone when it rings because you will then spend half an hour trying to evade a pushy salesman who wants to sell you photovoltaic panels or a computer voice that wants to tell your fortune.
It is much better to have an answering machine deal with them for you, so here are some suggestions:
Firstly consider whether the message on your answering machine should be in French or not. You will find that English, or even better Italian or Spanish, will deter the majority of cold-calls straight away.
For the more persistent I suggest that you then give a series of choices to your callers.
1. “If you are calling to sell me insulation or solar heating please be advised that I am unlikely to hand over large amounts of cash to a company I have never heard of. If you are convinced I will change my mind after a long conversation please post details of your proposal including all costs and benefits, three refences from satisfied customers and your SIRET number and I will be happy to take a look.”
* Note – it is important not to actually give an address, you don’t actually want a postbox full of sales literature!
2. “If you are phoning to tell me ‘I have received an important message, please push # to hear the message’, please consider how important your message really is. I have been informed hundreds of times about these important messages, have never listened to a single one, and my life doesn’t seem any the worse for it so far.”
3. “If you are calling to pretend you want to book our gites when really you want us to sign up for (and pay for) a listing on a holiday rentals site we have never heard you are wasting your time. Even if you call back every day for the next two weeks you are still wasting your time. Thank you.”
4. “If you would like to tell my fortune – well, in that case you will be able to guess my response already. After an extended period your phone call will automatically be forwarded to the France Telecom help line since they presumably gave or sold our number to you in the first place.”
5. “If you are going to start by asking (a) whether I am under 50 (b) whether I am a property owner (c) whether I am a taxpayer or (d) any other question that sounds like it comes from a credit application form please be advised I will lie to you from start to finish.
If you ask me to confirm that I am a property owner aged under 50 I will say that I am 75, and rent the house from an illegal immigrant. You get the idea.”
* Slight risk with this one – the last time I told a cold-caller I was not under 50 it was less than two minutes later that my details had been passed to their department selling something suitable for the over 50′s instead. They seemed surprised when I now claimed I was less than 50…
Of course this series of options will make your answering message rather long and tedious for any genuine callers, friends and family, but they will soon get used to it and quickly learn that they have time for a nice cup of tea while they wait for you to answer, or ring on your mobile instead…
Gosh, you English are funny. You can tell it is a call center pretty much instantly. I interrupt and say, ‘Never call me again’.
There might be some special phrase that eliminates these calls in France, but I don’t know it. In the US there is a no-call list online you can add your number to and you can also ask the caller to ‘remove my number from your lists’ and there are laws governing compliance.
Actually there are only about half a dozen funny people in England and then 65 million of us who copy them ruthlessly. Watch ‘Have I Got News for You’ for the original version of English humour…!
I never answer unless the call is from a number I’ve already stored in the phone. FFS, I live under a mountain. Don’t you think you could look at a map before you waste your time trying to sell me solar panels?
Hi Boris – I always pretend I can’t speak French and that I am a holiday maker answering the phone – it makes for a pretty quick end to the matter. Stephanie Dagg, a fellow blogger and author says that she makes up nonsense sentences such as “my uncle is a potato… hello please” which also has the desired effect! Strange how no matter how many times you register to not receive cold calls – they just keep on coming; book a service or work to be done – no sign of anyone! C’est la vie..
Ha, yes I’ll go with ‘my uncle is a potato’ from now on, sounds like the perfect response!
What I do is answer the phone and then leave it connected but place it on the desk and leave and close the door. Call Centres have systems which collect stats on these calls and if you hang up immediately, the stats show that the call was abandoned within a second or two indicating that the called party wasn’t interested. By leaving the call connected, the Call Centre operator has to cut the call thereby indicating that he failed to ‘sell’ you whatever he or she was selling. The stats then look much worse.
Hi,
really funny,,,,,but dont you think they are actually just doing their job. They have rent to pay and food to buy, like us all. But I do understand that it can get abit too much. xx
You’re right Nicola…but take for example the holiday rental site example I referred to. We get calls from people asking us to sign up for holiday rental sites quite often. The ‘business model’ they use is that first someone creates a holiday rental listing site, cost perhaps 2000 euros to setup and make look nice, then they pay a call center somewhere to get hold of a list of contact details for thousands of gite owners. The call center staff ring owners with all sorts of tempting offers, ‘first year sign up only 100 euros’ sort of thing. Presumably the call center staff get part of that income and the site owners the rest. But the site will never get results for the property owners, being new and with no publicity budget, it’s all just a con to deprive gite owners (not usually very rich to start with) of their hard earned cash.
So while I have every sympathy with people struggling to pay their bills etc, if the answer is to con other people my sympathy dwindles fast.
I could tell similar tales about why the other examples given are usually a con but fear no one is interested in more of my blatherings!
Hi there,
in that case I really do understand. That must be so frustrating. Then maybe even on top of all that, the language barrier……When we lived near Limoges, we found it so difficult to go through the day with limited french. We were able to communicate in the end, due to our language getting better, but I must say the slight detection of an english accent, always led to strange behavior.
I put it down to the region we were in, I guess on the coast or near Paris, french people are quite happy to practise their english.
So, yes going back to your article I can now understand where you are coming from and I have not a clue what I would “fall” for if I was still in France. Ireland is very different that way. An irishman can somehow never con another person……enjoy your day
We are listed on the “Liste Orange” of France Telecom (landlines), and on the government run Pacitel http://www.pacitel.fr/particuliers.php
It works, nowadays we get almost no unsolicited sales calls.
We subscribed to a “intercept your calls” service which seems to be working. Twice an automatic voice has asked if we want to accept a call from someone (we did, both times) and the general run of sales calls seems to have dried up. Before that, I did find the phrase to use, which goes something like this:-
Désolé Madame/Monsieur, je ne répond jamais aux démarchages téléphoniques.
I actually try to keep them engaged in conversation as I look at it like a free french lesson