When receiving unsoliciting phone calls by telemarketers, many people consistently hung up, don’t bait, and don’t interact. So why don’t telemarketers delete from their databases such phone numbers that don’t lead to any sales or other business benefits?

Maybe the cost of keeping the numbers is so low telemarketers just don’t bother. Or keeping track of what numbers to delete may actually have a cost. Or perhaps telemarketers hope those people will eventually pick up the calls.

Any insight?

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    10 months ago

    because they aren’t people 99% of the time, it’s a computer program. It’ll keep attempting, and if you do engage it will switch over to a real person once they have someone hooked.

    They even have ones that garner attention, like shuffling noises, saying “Oh I’m sorry, hang on a second” and other gimics to keep you on the line and start engaging. You’d be surprised at how many people will say “Oh sure” out of politeness.

    As for cost, to run a virtual machine in the cloud running 24/7 trying all the numbers one by one in the database would cost… pennies. We’re talking probably less than 5 bucks a month.

    • sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      As for cost, to run a virtual machine in the cloud running 24/7 trying all the numbers one by one in the database would cost… pennies

      but how much does it cost to make the phone call. Don’t they get charged per minute by phone companies?