Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Company Tries Selling Printing Supplies to Printing Company


Cold calls for unnecessary services are a pain, but these people put themselves in a no-win situation. They must be pretty bored at the call center t try this hard to sell printing supplies to a printing company. For some professional time wasting, here's a guy who sent a scammer on a crazy ride.

1.

Text - Posted by u/nenepp 3 days ago O 6 2 3 23 You won't stop cold calling a printing company to sell us printing unless I agree to set up a meeting with one of your reps? OK then. oc L I'm not sure if this quite counts as malicious compliance but I was just doing what they wanted me to so I guess it fits. In the mid 00's I worked for a small printing company, our commercial work was on large lithographic machines but we still had office printers and a number of staff who knew a lot about them.

2.

Text - I don't think a single one of our office printers had been purchased new or even working, the owner just bought job lots of broken office printers for not a lot of money and then frankensteined them into working ones. We didn't often buy printer paper because we'd just cut leftovers from the factory to suitable sizes for the office. Overall our office printing costs were extremely low despite the fact that we printed tens of thousands of pages a year. I was a general office dogsbody, amon

3.

Text - An office printing management service had got our number. They were offering a completely managed service where they loaned the machines, supplied the consumables, took care of everything and you just paid per print - great for some companies, expensive and unnecessary for us. When they first started ringing I kept telling them "sorry, we aren't interested, please remove us from your list" or "we're a printing company, we don't need managed printing services, please take us off your list"

4.

Text - caller was convinced he could save us money regardless of all that, I guaranteed him he couldn't, as I doubted we paid more than a penny a page. Naturally he didn't believe me, as far as he was concerned if I was answering the phone I was the office junior (no-one important answers the phone) who had no idea how much printing actually cost, and just too stubborn and/or stupid to put him through to someone that mattered and if he persisted eventually he'd get through to the right person wh

5.

Text - "Right, fine, sure, you can book a meeting for your reps but I guarantee it will be a complete waste of their time". I scheduled them a meeting with the "office manager" (me) on a Friday afternoon when I'm the only one in the office so I won't be too busy and it'll be a diversion. The reps arrive, I show them into the office, they are clearly thinking we spend a lot on printing because we have so many damn printers and I gave a rough idea of how much we get through in the office, they giv

6.

Text - Paraphrased conversation: Me: Not completely sure, think it's around £100-200 a year. Rep: Nah it'lI be a lot more than that with the amount of printing you do, is that just the paper? Me: No, that's just ink and toner. Rep: (looks sceptical) Well there's the paper too Me: To be honest we mostly cut down leftover paper from the factory or sometimes suppliers give us a few cases for free

7.

Text - Rep: OK, right, so what about the initial costs of the machines, if you average it out over the lifetime of prints rather than considering it just as capital expenditure it can make up a significant portion of your printing costs - this photocopier for example, it's a few years old now and you're looking at about £12,000 to replace it with a similar spec machine, so with our service you can avoid that capital expense. Me: The owner buys them broken and repairs them, most of the printers o

8.

Text - Rep: ...and the ongoing maintenance costs Me: :| Rep: . then there's the costs and lost productivity of downtime to consider... He is trailing off at this point, it's clearly part of his rehearsed spiel but he can also see downtime isn't an issue when we bizarrely have more printers than computers. Rep: There's absolutely no point us being here is there? Me: No, I'm afraid not. That was repeatedly explained to the guy who set up the meeting, but he said your company won't stop cold callin

9.

Text - The reps agree it is a complete waste of time, have a bit of a frustrated laugh about the call centre and say it's not the first time they've been sent to completely pointless meetings because the call centre folks get their commission based on the quantity not quality of the meetings they set up. They don't bother giving me their quote. I never heard from the company again.

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