Why don't telemarketers give up on unresponsive numbers?
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.
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.
They are going by volume, so the overall successes matter and the reason for why the rest are unsuccessful doesn't matter.
Phone numbers get reused all the time, so if they pull the number from the pool they miss a possible future opportunity. This is important when lack of success would massively shrink their pool of numbers at no real cost savings to them since they are going for volume anyway.
Basically you are asking from a logical and well intended point of view, but telemarketers are approaching it from a maliciously logical volume method that benefits from stumbling across enough gullible people to make the rest of the volume worth it.
Sure it can be, what I'm trying to say is that there is no financial incentive for it to be though. Programming takes time and money, and there is literally no profit to be had for doing it.
Instead of being unresponsive, be a time waster. Be hostile. Keep agreeing until they try to get information out of you. Is your name John but they ask for Greg? Say, yes this is Greg.
I turn these calls in to entertainment opportunities. And it may be confirmation bias but after having done this for a couple months, call volume has dropped dramatically.
Maybe this is a bad idea. But for me, it’s been fun.
My favorite so far was to keep agreeing and saying yes, then to turn on porn silently, then slowly increase the volume and ask if they can hear that. Get mad at them for making you listen to it. Keep turning up the volume until it is deafening. They will hang up.
There's actually a service called jolly rodger that you can forward calls to that uses AI and such to try and do this. It's pretty cheap, under $20 a year (and also does voicemail and transcribes the calls to a text). I think it does cut down on junk calls, they tend to just hangup.
Re: the first paragraph. Many countries have different laws for remote/unsolicited sales versus actual bricks and mortar sales. Where I’m currently living regardless of what I say or agree to I still have a 14 day cooling off period where I can annul any agreement or contract regardless of the circumstances. I think it’s called “distance selling regulations” in this jurisdiction.
Part of the telemarketing industry is selling crappy lists to new/unwary telemarketers. The sellers don't and maybe can't properly curate the lists, and the telemarketers try to make a living through volume of calls.
by volume, it's trivial amounts of both, and those unresponsive numbers will often get recycled eventually. people just don't hold on to phone numbers as long as they used to.