The Pragmatic Analysis on Refusal Strategies of the Indonesian Customers in Outbound Telemarketing Business

Abstract

Advertisements in printed or electronic media are commonly considered as the ways of
promoting or marketing one’ products or services; however, some marketing experts still
think that telemarketing is one of effective marketing activities as it is carried out intensively
by using communication technology in the form of telephone or internet and trained personal
to attract potential customers or sell products or services to existing customers in the
targeted consumer groups. In fact, some telemarketers have experienced that their efforts to
persuade or convince the targeted customers to use or to buy their products do not always
work well. Some potential customers agree and buy the products or use the services, and
some others disagree and refuse them for some reasons. This qualitative research
investigates what kinds of refusal strategies Indonesian customers implement to reject or
refuse the Gym services offered by telemarketers, and what kinds of refusal strategies
Indonesian male and female customers dominantly use. The data on refusal strategies are
taken from 60 Indonesian customers collected from a Discourse Completion Task (DCT)
firstly developed by Blum-Kulka. They are, then, analyzed and categorized based on 11
categories of refusal strategies proposed by Azis (2000). The research shows that all
categories of refusal strategies employed by customers and the most dominant refusal
strategy employed by male Indonesian customers is Direct No (20%) and by female
Indonesian customers is also Direct No (17%) meaning that both Indonesia customers
employ dominantly Direct, No refusal strategy