There’s No Such Thing as a Free Phone Call

When you dial an 800 telephone number to complain about a product, ask a question or pay a compliment, you end up providing information. Operators are trained to collect a variety of data--your name, phone number, address, what products you use, how you use them and future products you’d like to see. The 800 number is increasingly being used as a marketing tool.

Companies say that these data have led to a host of new and/or improved products, better packaging, enhanced nutrition labeling and changes in advertising. And gathering information this way is both faster and less expensive than more traditional research methods.

The 800 number “is a service to consumers, but it provides wonderful information about the people using your product,” says Sally Shlosberg, vice president of consumer relations and technology services at Grand Metropolitan-Pillsbury. Its 800 lines average 2,000 calls a day. “That’s a good dialogue,” Shlosberg says, especially in this era of impersonal shopping.

But this dialogue has privacy activists concerned. For one thing, the information may be “valuable enough to be sold for a second purpose,” notes Janlori Goldman, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s privacy and technology project.

What’s more, many companies know the caller’s number even before operators answer the phone, thanks to caller identification. “The problem is people don’t know that their numbers are being revealed,” says Goldman, who is pressing for federal legislation that would require companies to inform callers that their phone numbers have been exposed and to get customers’ permission to keep the information on file.

“As a consumer, I would have the same concerns,” says Pillsbury’s Shlosberg. However, she notes, Pillsbury doesn’t use caller ID and keeps customer information for internal purposes only. “We would never sell names or addresses,” she says.

But, she adds, the company does follow up by contacting consumers who have previously called when it thinks their opinions might be helpful--and then often rewards these consumers with coupons.

“Unless we make it easier for consumers to tell us now what they want to see in their cake mixes in the future, we’ll be at a competitive disadvantage,” says Shlosberg, adding that Pillsbury operators “will always try to answer consumers’ questions or resolve their concerns first. But then, while we have them on the phone, we like to take advantage of the opportunity and solicit their opinions.

“If they are calling about our microwave brownies, we may ask questions on how to improve that product. If they are interested in our Lovin’ Lites cake mixes, we may ask what kinds of flavors they might want to see or take the opportunity to further explore their interest in having a low-calorie cake and eating it too.”

A similar process occurs at General Mills, which fields about half a million toll-free calls a year. Operators don’t question every caller, but tend to when customers call about a new product.

For example, if the call is about a new cereal, a company operator will try to ask what other cereals are purchased, how often cereal is eaten and the age range of the cereal chompers in that particular household. Among other things, says General Mills consumer services manager Jan Ecklund, “This helps you learn if your advertising is targeting the right customer.”

Whether or not they ask demographic questions, operators at almost all companies try to elicit a caller’s name, address and telephone number.

“We try to collect names and addresses on everybody,” says Donald L. Mayer, director of the consumer response and information center at General Foods U.S.A., which this year expects to receive close to 1 million calls on its toll-free lines. “A very small number say no.”

General Foods keeps the data for two years and will periodically use it for various product promotions. Like most companies, it offers to send coupons, recipes, nutrition information or other material, depending on the nature of the call.

For the past two summers, for example, General Foods has sent a recipe booklet and coupon for pectin to customers who called seeking help in making jams and jellies. “They are our known users, and we want to get recipes into their hands with coupons to get them to buy more of our product,” says Mayer.

General Foods says it uses caller ID as a safeguard against the couple of threats of product poisoning the company may receive annually. Otherwise, says Mayer, “we always ask permission to put the phone number in our database.”

While consumers can punch in several numbers to bar the recipient from identifying the number of the phone being used to make a local call, it is not yet possible for consumers to keep their number confidential on a long-distance call.

Even if it were, companies eventually would get a list of everyone who called the 800 number as part of their long-distance bills, because the company, after all, is paying for the call. (That’s the principle of the 800 number--a type of collect call without having to go through the operator.)

The lists of callers used to be available monthly but now can be provided within five minutes of every call, long-distance officials note.