I’ve excerpted this e-mail
on the Friday mailbags, here’s the whole thing. Readers like Mr. Davis are one
of the upsides of this columnist gig, his perspective on the cost of doing
business of unsolicited e-mails and faxes, not only in time and aggravation but the accompanying cost in quality of customer service, is provocative.
Hello David:
I really enjoyed your
article...
I personally feel that this
sort of issue is a difficult thing to deal with but would love to see
the unsolicited FAX and call scenario go away.
I am a "small business
owner" in Palm Springs, CA, and I find that both are real drains on resources
for a small company. I must get 250 unsolicited FAXes a week; no
way to determine how many unsolicited sales calls. I have always hated having
to talk to an unattended answering system but in all honesty, it does eliminate
much of the unsolicited calling.
While I would far rather
have a live person answering my phones, I have given in and moved in
that direction instead of having a pleasant, reasonably intelligent human being
answer the phone just because of the quantity of unsolicited calls. I feel I
have tried everything I can legally try to get by them. It costs me about 6
employee hours a week to "try to get off" the FAX lists, by calling
the remove numbers, not to mention the toner, ink and paper.
All of us that have ever
depended on FAX machines for business have tried the FAX servers but that
technology has a substantial cost to it as well, and has never been very
reliable.
The current laws are a joke
and have no teeth whatsoever. This [proposed law outlawing all unsolicited
faxes] would be a wonderful change but all the laws on the books really mean
nothing until something is done to enforce
them.
E-Mail is in worse shape as
it is the new means of business communication. Up until about 2002, we used to
get about 700 FAXes a week that were legitimate forms of communication. Now, I get
about 50 legitimate and 250 illegitimate. It is hardly worth the effort and
expense of a dedicated FAX line and all that goes with it. FAXes will soon go
away altogether.
If the spoofing and spamming
in E-Mail does not cease soon, the usefulness of E-Mail, as we know it now,
will be questionable. I again must pay someone at least minimum wage for 2 to 3
hours a day to deal with all the junk that slips into our system, AFTER it has
been filtered and computer handled. It seems that it should be easy for the
government to control this but politics being what it is, seems to only cloud
the water. Perhaps you will be able to research and do an article on finding
and intelligent way to handle the E-Mail problems.
I own a small computer and computer
service business. It is a family owned business and we have been here for 30
years. We do mostly repairs, custom installations, networking, support, custom
equipment and some sales.
One of the negative factors
of all of this is that by having to compromise on something as simple as
answering a phone, often confusion and uncertainty causes problems, for both
the business and for the customer.
Not being able to just
simply communicate is a real negative in the business world where
customer contact is imperative. Even cell phones now are subject to mass
solicitation. It seems that would be easy to control but the communications
industry looks the other way and asks the government to do the same. Most of
the time, they do.
However, a business must draw
the line somewhere and try to work within the boundaries made since we
can expect no assistance from the goverment. Where 2 or 3 out of every 5 calls
to a business is a solicitation, productivity of employees grinds down.
The same is true for E-Mail.
Our guess is that 25 out of every 30 into our domain are junk. At best we electronically
stop 13 or 14 out of 30. The rest must be handled or take the chance of an
important loss or answer being tossed. It does not make sense that 99.9% of the
businesses in the US must pay for junk E-Mailers to operate within the US. And
my best information is that the US is only a small fraction of the source for
junk and spam worldwide.
It is a sad commentary to
say that about a third of the IT budget, small companies or large, is spent
fighting and avoiding outside, uninvited intrusion such as FAXes, phone calls,
spam, junk mail ad E-Mail, adware and spyware, and viruses. Think how efficient
data processing, not to mention businesses in general, could be without all
that nonsense.
I have been in the computer
industry since cutting my teeth on IBM 360s, Data General Novas and DEC octal
machines in the early 60s. There have been good companies and those that were
not so good. Others, such as IBM and Microsoft have had a significant impact on
our world, not just the computer industry. Microsoft is obviously huge and huge
companies are ALWAYS the targets of bashing. They don't do any more for me than
they do for anyone else in the industry but it really bothers me to see all of
the bashing of Microsoft.
We would have no industry
without them! They didn't cause the problems, certainly not these though they
are tried and convicted of it daily; and as I see it, they are no more
"unfair" in business ethics than most businesses in all other
industries. They have provided a very good product in the industry for a very
reasonable end user price. I paid $10,000 for my first Nova OS, XP Pro is $300
45 years later. Considering inflation over the years, it is practically a gift!
Although the computer
industry has continued to advance technology and lower prices, that cannot
continue if this nonsense of the government avoiding the responsibility
of "doing the right thing" when it comes to controlling abusers of the
communications in the country fails to change.
Is it a small problem? Yes
and no. It is a small segment of the business world but in dollars, it is huge
and it is THE eroding factor for what is right and wrong in business in
general. It seems to me that 50 years ago, ethics mattered and doing
"wrong" was a rarity. Now much of business as a whole is based on
intentionally skirting the issues and riding a very fine line between right and
wrong.
The communications industry SHOULD be the ones policing themselves; the
computer industry should do the same. Instead both are leeches on all of
businesses that MUST use them.
Sorry about unloading but
this is an UGLY aspect of business. Good luck and thanks again for the article.
