By Don Oldenburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 20, 2002; Page F01

NEW ORLEANS

Just as Tom Searcy reaches mid-theory about why Americans' contempt for telemarketers is so terribly unjust, he stops cold, as if someone had slammed down the phone on him for the millionth time.

His grin widens at the inescapable irony around him here at Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World. The richly decorated warehouse a few miles from the French Quarter is where the nation's best and brightest telemarketers have escaped the workshops of their national convention to party Mardi Gras-style. They are surrounded by wild and hellish props, super-size gargoyles and giant demon heads showcased from the famed annual parades.

Searcy glances over his shoulder at a grotesque 10-foot-tall insectlike alien. One of telemarketing's superstars, Searcy looks more like a real estate agent or lawyer in his unassuming sport coat and quiet tie. But he concedes that the public sees telemarketers as more akin to that green, goo-drooling monster behind him.

"You got me right next to the creature!" he says. A fair image? He mocks a hurt look. Of course not, he says.

No, says his twin, Tim Searcy, standing nearby. "We don't have four heads and three eyes."

They laugh, but they both have been hung up on, tongue-lashed, cursed and threatened for doing their jobs. "You occasionally get someone who berates you with a bunch of profanity and that's just awful," Tim says. "That's when the telemarketer is the victim."

Spend a couple of days at the American Teleservices Association's 19th annual convention, held over four days earlier this month at the Marriott New Orleans, and you almost get to like these folks you otherwise curse for their daily interruptions. You almost have to admire their resolve to fight for their livelihood against proposed laws that would crack down on their 24 billion calls a year. You almost have to be impressed with their resilience against nonstop bashing. You almost have to admit that, hey, telemarketers, they're human beings just like you and me.

Until the next time they call during dinner, of course.

"Most telemarketers are common ordinary folks," says Bill Miklas, ATA chairman and vice president at Sitel Corp., one of the world's leading call-center companies. He's seated in a nearly empty pressroom upstairs. "They're folks that you pass by on the street every day. They're folks in your church, they're folks that you bank with. They're us!"

Us, in this case, being about 500 of the big shots of the telemarketing world. The telemarketers at this convention aren't the phone flunkies who mispronounce your name. Or the minimum-wage drones who refuse to take no for an answer. These are the suits from the executive suites, the promising Young Turks. But nearly all of them started "on the phones," as they nostalgically say.

"Telemarketers are not a group of people that gets bused into a call center to make calls, and then gets bused out to wherever," says Miklas, who started on the phones as a 24-year-old college grad selling travel service programs and fundraising for political campaigns in the Midwest.

Like most at the convention, Miklas makes no apologies for telemarketers. He's even loath to fess up that telemarketers are truly loathed.

"How many lawyers jokes have you heard? How many doctors jokes have you heard? Used-car salesmen? Politicians? Journalists?" he says. "I think there are detractors to any type of profession.

"There's always going to be a faction of those whom you can't please all the time. What we're trying to do is provide products and services to you that we think are a value. Sometimes we hit it right on the mark and sometimes we don't."

And "if I believe I'm being treated as a number or somebody isn't listening to me," he says, he hangs up.

They could have asked Rodney Dangerfield to give the keynote address, but telemarketers don't grovel for respect. Instead they brought in Sally Ride.

Ride connected with the image-challenged audience, since she, too, had encountered "an unexpected set of public perceptions" as America's first female astronaut in the testosterone-fueled world of manned space flight.

"Through your vision, creativity and dedication, you'll be able to reach for the stars and help your customers reach for the stars," she encouraged them. "You are at the forefront of a revolution in understanding the way people use their imagination and creativity to interact with information and interact with each other."

After her hour-long speech, as she headed out of the hotel, a reporter asks Ride what she thought of the telemarketers.

"Their image is something that needs to be tended to," she says diplomatically.

So they drive her nuts, too?

Naw, she says: "I have a blocked phone."

They're trying, they insist. Trying to tend to their image. They began with little steps, as when four years ago they replaced the incendiary "telemarketing" in the trade association's name with the vanilla "teleservices," and changed Telemarketing Magazine to Call Center Solutions Magazine.

They believe the public would understand them if they just knew a few things.

First, they want people to know that "telemarketer" doesn't just mean the stereotypical caller people hate, the uninvited solicitor. It's also the customer service rep who takes your catalogue order, files your insurance claim and sells you concert tickets.

"If you are stranded on the side of the road because your car tire just blew out and it's 3 o'clock in the morning, and you call somebody for help? That's a teleservice person on the other end of that line," Miklas says, defying popular perception of what a telemarketer is.

He's not done: He points out that a call center assisted a major insurance company in contacting claimants to pay out $9 million in 9/11 claims. "The families and folks who were beneficiaries of those policies understood the value of that outbound call," he says.

Another thing, the telemarketers say in their defense, their negative image is primarily due to bad telemarketers. "Ill-managed marketing campaigns," Miklas calls them, sipping a glass of water in the press office. Some telemarketing companies "don't understand who they're calling, they don't have a good product, they don't have a good price point," he says. "But the times when you call the right person at the right time with the right product for the right price, then it is all good."

Like when you buy a car from a used-car salesman, and you love the car, he says. "You don't have a negative connotation of that used-car salesman, right?"

Moreover, these captains of telemarketing point out that people do in fact buy things from telemarketers. They say that 2001 was a record year: 185 million people spent $276.6 billion on purchases from outbound telemarketers (business spent another $392.2 billion).

"Everybody receives about 300 telemarketer calls each year," Tom Searcy is explaining off to the side of the noisy Mardi Gras Ball. "People will tell you, 'I scream at them' and 'I hang up on them.' But the fact is, they don't. On average, people buy 11 things from telemarketers for every household every year."

The problem, he theorizes, is that 11 buys in 300 calls is only a 3 percent upside; the rest is the no-thanks, scream-in-the-phone, don't-call-me-again downside that he believes grows unfairly large in people's selective memory. "Are you going to remember the 97 percent of the times you said no and hung up?" he asks. "Or are you going to remember the 3 percent when you bought? It's a frequency issue. People forget."

Tom and Tim Searcy, the twins, grew up in the business, getting their start as 10-year-old newspaper carriers in Omaha, cold-calling households for subscription renewals.

Tim Searcy remembers that first sales script: "It goes, 'Hi, my name's Tim Searcy. I'm just like the guy who delivers your paper every Thursday, dry and on your doorstep, with $2 at least of money-saving coupons. And I wanted to know if you would like to continue to receive the papers?' "

By 14, Searcy was taking inbound calls for Astro Telemarketing and Mardex, two of the original telemarketing companies. By 16, he was "managing a room" for Dial America Marketing.

Now 37, the twins are highly regarded Indianapolis-based consultants in what has become the pariah profession in America. When they started, it was a respected business. On the convention's finale evening, Tim Searcy emcees the ATA's inaugural Teleservices Hall of Fame ceremonies -- an image-nurturing, white-tablecloth affair in one of the Marriott's chandeliered salons.

Among the honorees were now-retired Gary and Mary West, who in 1973 founded Mardex, which set the earliest standards for handling phones for clients like Time-Life Books and Ginsu knives. In 1986 the couple founded West Teleservices, which would become one of the largest all-service telemarketing firms, today employing 22,000 people.

Another honoree, Jim Lynch, launched Sitel in 1985. The Baltimore-based company is an industry leader, with centers in 19 countries offering services in 25 languages and contacting 1.5 million customers per day by telephone, the Web, e-mail, fax and traditional mail.

"They are the pioneers," says Tim Searcy, adding that while most of the honorees are unknown to the public, they're legends in the 30-year history of telemarketing.

Murray Roman is considered the father of telemarketing. In the late '60s he founded a shop in Manhattan called Campaign Communications, where he hired out-of-work actors to put some feeling into selling subscriptions for Saturday Review.

By the early '70s, telemarketing had spread across the country, but there were no advanced technologies, no market research, no training programs, no scripts.

Most companies just had a bank of rotary telephones and stacks of 3-by-5 cards with names and numbers straight out of the phone book. The concept was simply making a person-to-person sales connection over the phone.

Then technology changed telemarketing into the ugly stepchild of Madison Avenue.

By the mid-'80s, predictive dialing -- automated speed dialing to multiple customers simultaneously -- was making telemarketing more efficient but also impersonal and maddening, leaving all but the first customers to pick up the phone hearing a click.

Anticipating a backlash, in 1985 the Direct Marketing Association, a trade association representing all direct marketers, from telemarketers to junk-mailers, created a "telephone preference service" supposedly enabling people to opt out of telemarketer calls from its member companies. But the problem persisted.

In 1991, Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, granting consumers certain rights to defend themselves against telemarketing. In 1995, the Telemarketing Sales Rule targeted deceptive and abusive telemarketing practices.

But the problem grew to mega-monster proportions.

A cheap and effective method of selling (the industry estimates roughly $3.50 in sales for every dollar spent), telemarketing ranked fourth of the 100 Worst Ideas of the 20th Century, according to a Time Magazine poll two years ago.

In his 16-year career, Miklas says, he has seen the real face of telemarketing, not just the annoying disembodied voice on the other end of the line.

"We have handicapped people, we have elderly people, we have young people working their way through high school, and we have potential entrepreneurs out there," he says. "We have people in big cities and in small communities as well. And they appreciate that if that job wasn't available to them, there isn't a whole lot of other things they could do."

According to a study by the Direct Marketing Association, the face of outbound telemarketers -- those people calling to sell -- looks something like this: 60 percent are women, 40 percent men. Twenty-six percent are full-time students, 70 percent are high school grads, 5 percent are college grads. About 65 percent are racial minorities, and 5 percent are handicapped. Sixty-two percent of the women are mothers, 26 percent are single mothers. Their mean annual wage is $20,285 (or $9.67 per hour; commissions can up that to about $12 an hour).

Tim Searcy, sitting at a table off the exhibition hall, leans closer and gets more serious. "People ask me, 'Tim, why do you like this business so much?' It's a thankless business. There are many people who have legitimate and not-so-legitimate concerns about people calling them at home at dinnertime. "But you know why I love this business? It's simple. Nobody cares who your daddy is, nobody cares how much money you have, nobody cares what school you went to, all anybody cares about is whether you do a good job."

The friction is not all the telemarketers' fault, you know. You hear that a lot at the convention. Stories of obnoxious and rude consumers are as legendary as the public's tales of obnoxious and rude telemarketers: The ones who respond to "How are you today?" with "Why do you want to know?" Or the ones who interrupt a female telemarketer with "Wait a second, honey. First tell me what you're wearing." And the classic: "I'm busy right now but if you give me your home phone number, I'll call you back tonight."

"There's a million war stories," says Tim Searcy, remembering a guy he called for a magazine renewal who started yelling that his house was on fire. "I mean, what are you supposed to do? I said, 'Sir, do you need me to call the police?' And he said, 'How can you be calling me? My house is on fire!' And hung up. I'm thinking to myself, why would I know your house is on fire? And why would you answer your phone?"

He prefers the funnier stories, like the time he was a kid trying to sell renewal subscriptions for Bride's magazine. "Now think about this: Who in the world is going to renew Bride's magazine?"

But telemarketers, Searcy says, can't let hostile responses get them down.

He refuses to think, "My God, people out there hate us," even for a moment. "It's going to happen," he says. "What do you do? You get real. You buck up. This is not personal, it is not about you. They haven't called your mother a bad name because they know her."

But hold on now. What about complaints that telemarketers invade people's privacy, calling at bad times in the evenings and on weekends?

Searcy says that argument is overblown. "I don't see it as an invasion of privacy," he says. "The line of privacy is not as bright or clear as people think. I find it offensive when I see billboards that offend me or when I hear an ad on a radio station that offends me. We're at a point now that when you watch the Disney Channel, they've got commercials! And you're paying to watch it! I find that to be intrusive."

People don't have to look at billboards and they can change the station on their radios, he says. "People have remedies to stop these phone calls, too," he says, referring to the DMA's telephone preference list and do-not-call lists in some states.

"People's ideas of what's intrusive changes all the time," he adds. "Someone calls you with something you don't want? Well, how do you know you don't want it unless they offer it to you?"

But what about dinnertime calls that are the defining moment of the tempest in telemarketing?

Searcy says some people eat dinner at 5 p.m., others at 8. "How do you know when it's dinnertime?"

Besides, he adds, in most places, anytime between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., seven days a week, "it's all legal."

On the "Tonight Show" a couple weeks ago, Jay Leno joked about six al Qaeda suspects held in Buffalo on terrorism charges: "One of the men arrested listed his occupation as telemarketer. Forget the terrorism. That alone should get him life in prison."

The public laughs. Telemarketers don't. Especially not now, when 27 states have enacted do-not-call lists that allow citizens to exclude themselves from telemarketers. Some have done so with a vengeance: In April, to celebrate the first anniversary of the New York do-not-call list, which then totaled 2 million names, the state's Consumer Protection Board publicly crushed 100 telephones with a steamroller.

Indeed, the telemarketers have convened their national convention in a state whose do-not-call program, instituted in April, already ranks second in penalties against lawbreaking telemarketers; in its first six months, Louisiana's Public Service Commission fined 33 companies a total of $234,750.

The ATA expects hundreds more bills to be introduced in state legislatures. And the FTC is expected to create a national do-not-call registry within the year.

Tuesday afternoon's regulatory update session begins with a compulsory "Boy, do I feel great!" group cheer by the 75 or so people attending. But they really don't feel great after a two-hour overview of the spreading do-not-call phenomenon.

Miklas argues that millions of jobs are at stake. "If everybody has a complaint against teleservices so we'll just get rid of it altogether, well, '5.6 Million People Unemployed,' wouldn't make a good headline," he says.

But not all 5.6 million are making menacing cold calls that a nationwide do-not-call law might affect, right? Miklas concedes but says he doesn't have a breakdown of how many telemarketers make outbound calls. It's not a figure the industry publicizes. "But even if it is just a small percentage of that," he says, "it is still a large number of people who would be unemployed."

The telemarketers plan to fight. "Who wouldn't like to think that with one swoop of the pen, all the world's problems go away? That's just not the case," says Miklas. "We're selecting a legal team to protect our interests all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary."

And if they lose? Miklas shrugs that telemarketing will have to comply and that will be a business expense. "But it won't be the end of telemarketing," he says.

The exhibition hall displays the promise of telemarketing's future: to be more efficient, more targeted, less intrusive.

Soundbite Communications of Burlington, Mass., promotes an audio phone messaging system that can contact, survey and sales-pitch thousands of people in minutes.

Gryphon Networks, a Norwood, Mass., company, touts a network-delivered automatic do-not-call compliance service to telemarketers.

Among the dozens of workshops each day are subjects such as "How Does Your Customer Rate Your Service?"

In Gallery 5, Ronna Caras, president of Caras Marketing and Training in Danvers, Mass., leads a "Scriptwriting" workshop of 50 people. The subject: "unintrusive scripting."

Caras says she teaches telemarketers to write sales scripts that don't sound like telemarketing calls "because so many of the techniques are so offensive," she says.

She tells telemarketers to begin with as "open and honest tone of voice as they can manage" and provide first and last name, and their company's name. But the key, she says, is to give the customer a choice.

"Have you got a minute to talk or am I catching you at a bad time?" she says, giving an example of scripting a choice. Or "This may or may not be of value to you."

Given a choice, some people will listen, says Caras. "When backed against a wall, they will look to escape."

Tom Searcy says that's the industry's future. Smart selling. Helping people to understand that telemarketing is serving them.

"Do I think that telemarketing is going to save the world? No," he says. "But I do think that you will see a decreasing number of calls with an increasing amount of relevance to the customers as we become more intelligent about the customer and as we become more efficient at figuring out who not to call."

How it's going to happen, he adds, is through technology and tweaking the business, not regulations. "If we go ahead and say, screw it, do not call us, do not solicit us, what happens to people who buy those 11 things every year? What happens to the 185 million people who bought something over the phone last year?

"We're still working through how to get that exactly right," he says. "We're learning how to get better. And as we do, everybody's going to be less annoyed."