A “robocall” is a robot caller that is made by a computer system setup in such a way that it will call through a list of predefined numbers (leads) or it could just dial numbers sequentially (cold call) and when someone answers a recorded message will start to play. These recorded messages vary in content and purpose but this is the simplest description of robocall.
These types of calls are advantageous to businesses because of the low cost of making them. It does cost money to make calls but it costs a lot more money to have human agents sitting in seats making them. I can easily produce one recording
“Hello! Do I have a deal for you, it’s so amazing you need to press 1 now to talk with an agent about this remarkable offer!”
that can be played as many times as I want and concurrently. Meaning this recording could be played to 1000’s of answered telephones all at the same time at fractions of a penny per minute.
Most people hang up the phone when these calls come in to their telephone. These are generally not the people a business employing robocall methods wishes to talk with anyways. Remember the quote “a fool and his money are soon parted?” In this case the fool is usually the person that presses one to hear more about an unsolicited offer.
By blasting thousands of simultaneous calls a business can determine an answer rate and based of that set a level of staffing required to handle the consumers that actually press 1. Instead of having 1000 agents making calls the spammer now only needs a few people sitting in the office to handle those easily persuaded interested consumers.