Why We Let People Yell At Us Over The Phone
By Louis Hill
Every cold caller knows one thing: cold calling isn’t easy, but it definitely has its ups and downs. Some days go hours on end without a single phone call with the dial tone ringing in your ears as your only companion. While other days, every person picks up the phone leaving you with only a few moments to catch your breath or drink a swig of water. But one thing's for sure: heading into the call room, the type of day you’re walking into is never the same as the last. Every conversation is different, too. Conversations can range from a person who eagerly jumps at the chance to talk to an angry stranger taking out their frustrations over the phone.
As I finished my last round of training, I was giddy with excitement to see where I would be spending my days as a cold caller: the calling room. Tightly packed into Phelps Hall is a room big enough to be two small sized classrooms mushed together to fit twenty-eight cubicles. Accompanying the call room were the standard fluorescent lights that emitted just enough light to be functional. When I imagined working in a cubicle I expected my own cubicle that I could decorate and personalize. Instead the student callers rotated through the twenty-eight cubicles every shift. Every cubicle came with a headset (only the lucky ones got a headset with headphone cushions), a desktop computer, and helpful responses to specific worries and concerns commonly voiced over the phone. To liven up the shifts, the supervisors would play music in the background which meant more often than not we would be listening to Top 100 hits on repeat.
Although the workspace I envisioned was nowhere near close to what I got, the other aspects of the job definitely made up for it. The main way I survived working in such an emotionally draining job was through the relationships I made with my coworkers. They are really the only ones that understand what it means to cold call in its entirety. While my friends were supportive they couldn’t understand why I would spend my time in a space where I had to actively engage strangers and ask them for money. Nor could they understand why I continued working their after experiencing prejudice over the phone either. Meanwhile, my colleagues understood the heartwarming feeling you get when a prospect donates over the phone, or when a client gives you advice to advance your career and reminisces with you about their time at UC Santa Barbara.
Going into my first job as a cold caller--or, as we called ourselves, student ambassador--I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew bare minimum I would be getting rejected over the phone way too many times to count and that I was fundraising for student resources such as tutoring and study abroad. What I didn’t know was how often I would be yelled at, asked about my ethnicity, or how many people used fake voicemail services to deter solicitative phone calls. Going into my first cold calling job, I had my concerns interacting with strangers over the phone. As a queer black man with an evident lisp, my biggest fear was experiencing homophobia over the phone. I have always been aware that I have an effeminate voice and didn’t think it was going to be a big issue over the phone until I called one particular client. The call was going well enough the person had not immediately hung up on me and I was able to get through the first half of my spiel. “Hi, my name is Louis and I’m calling on the behalf of UC Santa Barbara,” was the only thing I got to say before I was suddenly bombarded by a stranger for the intonation I used to say Santa Barbara. It seemed that this was enough to set him on a rampage of homophobia as he begin to tell me how my grandfather and great-great grandfather would be disappointed in me and listed what qualities a man was supposed to possess (apparently all the qualities I lacked, even though I am a man). I was completely puzzled and confused, because surely this stranger couldn’t have the slightest idea of what my grandfather and great-great grandfather thought of me. I didn’t even know what they would think since they both passed away before I got a chance to meet them. Unable to escape his unsolicited lecture of my family tree and the disappointment I must cause as a queer male, I turned to my supervisor for advice. They immediately sided with me and told me to hang up the phone and remove that number from our list, but it turns out I hadn’t even talked to the actual client, just the alumni’s boyfriend. As I was figuring out how to handle the situation with my supervisor, my ears were being peppered left and right with homophobic slurs that quickly transitioned to transphobic slurs. Eventually, I found the courage to respond to him and asked if I could speak to the actual client which he immediately refused to put me through to and hung up on me. Fortunately, I only had one encounter with a situation like that one but it’s stuck with me ever since. Often times when I get yelled at over the phone I analyze the conversation and try to figure out what went wrong. Maybe if I had said Santa Barbara with a different intonation, I would’ve been put through to the client and possibly had gotten a gift. Maybe if I wasn’t comfortable in my own masculinity and deepened my voice I could’ve gotten the gift. These were the type of thoughts running through my mind until something clicked. I can’t blame myself for what I did or didn’t do when it comes to cold calling. As a cold caller you never know how a stranger is going to react or the type of day they just went through. You can’t control their reaction, but I can certainly control my reaction and what I take away from each phone call.
People go into cold calling for a variety of reasons. Whether it’s for cash, getting people to vote, or for another worthy cause. There are people on the other line of the phone who pick up the phone and make these cold calls every day. I had the opportunity to speak to a few people about their experiences with cold calling. UCSB sophomore Maggie Yao, a close colleague of mine, works at the UC Santa Barbara Annual Fund. Her job revolves around contacting parents and alumni to ask for donations to make sure student resources stay accessible on campus. As an incoming freshman, Yao knew she wanted to immediately get a job while in college, but she didn’t know where to look, so she took the first job offer flexible enough to work with her school schedule.
Through a text interview, Yao told me she thought working at the Annual Fund would be easy since she’s comfortable interacting and talking to clients through her customer service days. Assuming it would be one hundred times easier to do it without the face to face interaction she embarked on her first college job. When asked about any salient experiences during cold calling she talked about one particularly stressful shift. During this shift she had not been making any money and was calling the toughest card: freshman parents.
Calling freshman parents drains a lot of energy, because they have so many questions regarding the campus, its resources, and are excited to talk directly to a student since its their very first time being called by the school. The conversation started off normally with a discussion about student programs until the parent interrupted Yao to ask if she was a “white American female” because of the clarity and fluidity she spoke with over the phone. With teeth grit, she held back her anger at the situation, and responded with a politeness only mastered through customer service and explicitly told him she was of full Chinese origin. As cold callers, we develop a seventh sense when a phone call is about to take a turn for the worst. Once the client discovered her ethnicity, his tone and energy changed drastically from polite and civil to bland and harsh. He no longer wanted to hold a conversation and grew increasingly aggressive until he yelled at her and hung up before she could respond. These type of situations are hardly few and far between and the training handbook doesn’t readily provide answers to dealing with racism over the phone. “Unfortunately, I can not control the reactions of the people I call. Everybody reacts differently and sometimes you end up giving a call to someone who just had the shittiest day. Could you or I have known that? Absolutely not, so it's not your fault. In the end, they don’t know you and you don’t know them. Of course, I wish more people would recognize and respect the fact that we’re merely college students trying to make a living. Nobody can hurt you through the phone. Words from a stranger most definitely should not either,” Yao says as a final remark on her experience as a cold caller. While this is a common interaction for cold callers, Yao doesn’t let the attitude and comments of strangers affect her. Instead she chooses to take the high road and continue fundraising for student resources, a cause close to her heart.
Another UCSB student Ryenn Hill has also had multiple experiences with phone banking for Salud Carbajal’s political campaign to Planned Parenthood. She choose to cold call because she supports all of the candidates she was raising awareness for, as well as to campaign for issues that hit close to home. Throughout her experience with Planned Parenthood, she’s had to call many people not affiliated with the organization. This can lead to a dicey and awkward conversation--especially when they don’t agree with Planned Parenthood. When volunteering for an organization as politically charged as Planned Parenthood, it’s expected to come in contact with some hostile people. It was common for Hill to be yelled at all the time over the phone to the point where the phrase “baby-killing organization” would ring through her headset. “Normally while cold-calling, if someone’s yelling at me I’ll either try to let them vent or hang up if the statements are hurtful or aggressive. It’s frustrating when you support a candidate or organization so much, but not everyone does.I feel like it’s important to know that not everyone’s going to agree with you and not everyone knows how to convey that disagreement in a nice way. It’s important that you don’t take it too personally, because odds are they’ve got things of their own going on if they choose to be hurtful to someone they’ve never met over the phone,” she says. Hill refuses to let experiences stop her from volunteering for political awareness and Planned Parenthoods accessibility even if that means dealing with aggressive, hostile, and faceless strangers.
Caleb Brown, also has previous experience in phone banking. Caleb Brown is a third year Communication major at UCSB and he used to volunteer for Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign in 2016. Brown along with other volunteers were tasked with phone banking people in order to convince registered voters to choose Sanders during the primaries. Since this was a volunteer position, Caleb was not paid for his time and did it to support a candidate. Every cold caller has a different experience with cold calling and Caleb is one of the lucky few who didn’t experience any type of prejudice over the phone. But that didn’t make him exempt from the regular amount of angry strangers yelling at him that cold callers come to expect. Instead of talking about any prejudice over the phone, during our text interview, I decided to ask if he had anything he wanted people to know about cold calling. “If there was anything I could tell people about being a cold caller is to be prepared to experience a sense of alienation from their work,” says Brown, “being a faceless voice for the face of a corporation or campaign can be an unrewarding experience, at least for me it was. I would say to try your best to not take the negative aspects to heart and instead establish a positive relationship with fellow callers. That was what kept me willing to volunteer and give energy on behalf of the campaign outside of calling.”
While each of us cold called for different organizations and causes, we all have one thing in common. At the end of the shift we’re all human beings with emotions and, although you know it’s just some stranger over the phone, it’s easier said than done to not let their words affect us. At the end of the day both individuals walk away from the phone call, but those harsh and prejudicial attacks over the phone stay with us long after we take our headsets off. Following us through our lives whether it’s as student, as workers, or as volunteers we continue to let people yell at us over the phone for the causes we support.