Thursday, November 12, 2020

Company Won't Stop Cold Calling, Employee Calls Bluff


Sometimes, when you've reached your breaking point with the profoundly irritating company that seems hellbent on selling you the product that you never asked for in the first place, you've just gotta call their bluff. Not all heroes wear capes. Clearly. Check out some more juicy malicious compliance drama with this lazy manager who reneges on a request, right before the malicious compliance ensues.

1.

Text - r/MaliciousCompliance + Join u/nenepp • 26d 3 e 3 3 2 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. 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 a

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. was a general office dogsbody, among

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 - 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 who would reward him with a juicy contract. T

5.

Text - 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 give me their enthusiastic spiel about all the advantages, focusing on the costs, they want to sit down with the figures and see what they can save us, do I know what we spend at the moment? Paraphrased conversation: Me: Not completely sure, think it's around £100-200 a year. Rep: Nah

6.

Text - Me: To be honest we mostly cut down leftover paper from the factory or sometimes suppliers give us a few cases for free 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

7.

Text - Me: I hazard to guess he'll do exactly the same again. 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?

8.

Text - 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 calling until we agreed to a meeting so here you are L(Y)S 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

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