Asklemmy

43936 readers

616 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Why don't telemarketers give up on unresponsive numbers? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by amoroso@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] amoroso@lemmy.ml 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Possibly saving time and resources.

[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Exusia@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They don't? Everyone in my family has had the same numbers over a decade. I realize this is anecdotal, but I feel like people keep numbers forever now that phones can move from carrier to carrier much easier. Used to be in the 90s and 00's new carrier meant new phone and new number.

[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

my experience has very much been the opposite, which is also anecdotal-- but i'm going off of what a Verizon rep told me: that people, generally speaking, tend to recycle their numbers much more than they used to.

i don't have any other data to back that up, i'll be honest.

[–] Exusia@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thats so unusual to hear tbh. But if the numbers back it up I mean shit I guess I'd be wrong lol.

Any particular reason why they swap so much now?

[–] gregorum@lemm.ee 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

like i said, i'm going off what a guy in the Verizon store said, which is one step above pulling it out of my own ass, as far as data veracity goes.

but, if i were to guess, i'd speculate that it had to do with the disposability of numbers, how often people change providers after losing a number due to not having to pay or switching off of a parent's plan, things like that. People used to go to great lengths to hold onto old numbers. people don't really care as much now, even when porting them between carriers is easy.