“Toll Free” does not cut it
I HATE unsolicited phone calls. I hate them especially when they come from sources I can’t verify. There’s a reason why I subscribed to Caller-ID: I want to know who’s calling me. If you or your company does not want to reveal information about yourself, I have to assume that you want to hide something until you have a real person on the phone. Whenever I see a caller-id display of “Toll Free”, “Unidentified” or something along those lines, I will ignore your call and you’ll head straight to the answering machine. If you have important information for me, you’ll leave a message on the system. If you don’t leave a message, I have to assume that your call is not important enough to be returned. That technique has worked just fine over the last few years and I’m going to stick to it.
Recently I’ve been using 800notes.com to identify callers. I even have a firefox-plugin that allows me to enter the calling number and get to the records right away: NM Veterans of foreign Wars, some Chase sales office, etc. - you are not going to get a real person, because you don’t identify yourself. If you had nothing to hide, you would not hide your identity.