Worker tells of pressure and deceit at cold-call firm

Reporter

Friday 22 March 2013

A FORMER worker at a kitchen firm which bombarded people with thousands of unwanted calls has revealed details of what he says were shocking management practices and an "appalling" atmosphere in its call centres.

Custom byline text:

Ben Riley-Smith

The ex-staff member claimed Cumbernauld-based DM Design, which has been fined £90,000 after a year-long investigation into its practices, encouraged staff to ignore personal grief of potential customers when trying to close deals and used a system that might have ignored requests for no more calls.

He told The Herald that colleagues would lie about voucher promotions and invent company names to avoid detection while working in a horrible room covered in graffiti and chewing gum.DM Design was fined after the investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office, which criticised the company's "clear disregard" for law and "lamentable attitude" to the people it disturbed.The man, who does not wish to be named, worked at the call centre in Kirkcaldy, Fife, for more than a year and said his experiences suggested a fine was inevitable.He got paid £4.98 an hour to cold call properties in Scotland in an attempt to drum up business, with shifts usually lasting three hours and a team of 60 people on average making calls. The former worker said: "The atmosphere was appalling. It was full of people who had barely left school."The wages were terrible. The bonus was for each 'bite' you get. A bite is a customer's details – whether they own their home, postcode, address, age of their kitchen, bedroom or bathroom."For every single bite we got, we were telling them we were giving away 10 vouchers. But we were actually giving a voucher to everybody that got a call, apparently."If a confirmer called back your bite and managed to arrange a planning design for a kitchen, that meant you got a £3 bonus. That was the incentive."He said he could make up to 300 calls a shift and was expected to get at least 10 bites by a management team that pressurised employees to close deals.He said: "The management's pretty shocking in that place."I remember getting taken for training sessions by one of the bosses of the company. We asked him what happens if we phoned up and a woman says, 'my husband's died a couple of days ago, I'm really not interested'."Anybody with a heart would say, 'right, I'm really sorry for calling you, I'm really sorry, it won't happen again'. But this boss said 'well, I had a guy who called up someone once and the woman said her husband just died, and he managed to turn that into a next day sale'."I think everybody in the room thought that was disgusting."Employees would make up company names when calling to avoid suspicion, according to the worker.He said: "They change their name all the time from [things like] Davis & Dean to McAllister & Fitzgerald. They just pick random names like surnames of supervisors and staff that work there. They don't like saying DM Design. I think they assume they will just get hung up on."When he first joined he would work through pages of a phone book and make calls from a "dirty horrible room with graffiti drawn on the walls and chewing gum under the desk".The room was done up when a new automatic calling system was bought in.He wasn't sure if the computer mechanism that logged requests not to be called back actually worked.He left the firm when he found a better-paid job and was unsurprised when he heard of the fine. He said: "It was obvious they were doing something wrong. We were doing what we were told. It was up to them to figure out whether or not it was legal." The Herald put the allegations to DM Design, which said no director was available and declined to comment.

Contextual targeting label:

Block list

Commenting & Moderation

We moderate all comments on HeraldScotland on either a pre-moderated or post-moderated basis. If you're a relatively new user then your comments will be reviewed before publication and if we know you well then your comments will be subject to moderation only if other users or the moderators believe you've broken the rules, which are available here.

Moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. Please be patient if your posts are not approved instantly.

Worker tells of pressure and deceit at cold-call firm

Commenting & Moderation

MOST READ

SPONSORED LINKS

MOST COMMENTED