Stumbled upon this by accident, but it may prove useful in the future.
I know two people who’ve done telemarketing, and they report that their objective is to place as many calls as possible and sell as much as possible in that duration. So, not placing calls, or overly long calls, seems to be a serious negative.
Additionally, the system used appears to be an pre-emptive autodialer that looks for a human response and if found quickly connects with an operator. Should not be available, it hangs up, which explains why people report calls from mystery numbers that disconnect after being answered.
The operators sit there listening to silence until someone says “hello” and then they start. They have a button to dump the call, and the system goes on to the next.
Today I received a pre-emptive call and the moment I heard it transferring me to an operator, I pressed MUTE.
The unexpected happened.
I was greeted by just the sounds breathing and keyboard clicking. Within a moment it was possible to deduce from the background conversations that it was Yahoo trying to sell advertising to businesses.
Leaving mute on, I could hear the telemarketer cursing under his breath, as his line remained silent, but his co-workers were all yammering away. While I would have expected a call duration counter to have been the dead give away, it took him about 10-15 minutes to realize something was seriously wrong before he got assistance and it sounded like a reboot was about to be attempted before I got disconnected.
I’m guessing they run Windows.