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?

    • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      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·
        1 year ago

        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.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          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.

            • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
              5·
              1 year 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.

        • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          adding that level of verification to phone numbers would be a fair compromise, no? i like the level of anonymity you get with a phone number.