For the last year my wife’s small-but-growing, word-of-mouth based business has been listed with YellowPages.com. The Networking Group my wife was a member of included in their ranks a sales rep who pushed that this would be an outstanding way to expand her business. That they could setup an online coupon with my wife’s listing and people could just print it and walk in with it. All the typical sales rhetoric.
My wife felt that the momentum of her business (which was doing OK) could use a boost and decided to invest in advertising with YellowPages.com as an attempt to expand and grow her business. Contracts were signed, paperwork was filed, paperwork was turned in for the online coupon, and charges to my wife’s business card started piling up.
And as a result my wife’s business was listed on YellowPages.com.
Now, in the past year there certainly was an increase in traffic to my wife’s website. I have a statistics collection system running on her web server. And she got probably an additional 3-10 referrals via YellowPages to her website each month.
However, because of the lackluster and incompetent effort on the part of the sales rep we worked with (who’s now a district sales manager) my wife’s legitimate health care practice was listed along side escort services.
Nice…!
As a result those YellowPages.com referrals resulted in two calls. Those two calls resulted in requests typical of what escort services would provide (even tho for legal reasons they say they do not).
Pan forward a year… My wife, near the end of our contract, lo-and-behold gets a call from a new Yellowpages.com rep!! And he wants talk about renewal options for another year. My wife informs him that is not going happen. He goes into the usual rhetoric that sales reps right now are trying to use in the face of our current recession; ‘Well, with this recession going on it will be impossible for your business to survive without us!’. When she explains the lack of the online coupon, the lascivious phone calls, it’s at this point in time he’s willing to get the listing re-categorized but only in the face of certain discontinuation of a contract. When my wife asks about the online coupon he says; “Well, you needed to turn in the paperwork for that”. My wife said; “I turned in the paperwork for that [to the previous rep] when I signed up for service and paid all this money!” He replies; “Oh, well then there’s nothing I can do about that. Sorry.”
He tries every angle and pressure tactic he can think of and even offers a meager discount for the following year worth of service. Even though she didn’t get what she paid for to begin with.
At this point, if YellowPages.com wants my wife’s listing for another year, they can pony up a year’s worth of free service. They simply didn’t do their job and actually possibly did *damage* to my wife’s business considering it looks like it’s a damn prostitution service.
If you’re with YellowPages.com and you’re reading this, you and your company suck. Big time.
Why wouldn’t you simply ask for your coupon to be published when you discovered it was missing? Why wouldn’t you simply call the 1-800 number on your bill and ask customer care to assist? Why wouldn’t you just call your rep to help? Sounds like you bear some of the responsibility on this one. Why wait an entire year to address the issue, and then publically complain? As a 6-year employee of this company, I know we make mistakes but your complaint just doesn’t add up.
You know what.. unlike one of your other counterparts who dared to say I had no right to complain (even though the customer is always right) I think you’ve asked fair questions… and I’ll answer them.
First – WE DID ASK for the coupon to be published.. MULTIPLE times.. from our original rep. He never delivered.
Second – we did call via MULTIPLE avenues to try to get this resolved.. NONE of those efforts succeeded.
Finally – I’m YOUR customer.. or I was.. and YOU (well not YOU you but Yellowpages) screwed up. The value is called “ownership”. When I pay you for something you OWN the problems. When you do NOT resolve them satisfactorily or (even worse) cause HARM to a growing business then the burden to make it right (or refund the money) is on YOU.
Since YellowPages did neither, then Yellowpages gets this lovely statement of what they screwed up for posterity. It’s funny because the most contact I ever had from Yellowpages was AFTER my creating this blog post.
But for the sake of fairness I figured I should let ONE post come through from a YP employee to show that I will let someone from YP have a say…
BTW.. you DID get the official OK to contact me on behalf of Yellowpages, right? Otherwise this COULD be construed as corporate harassment of a former customer.. Just saying..
Hi Codethought, as a former employee who quit due to having a crisis of concience screwing with customers as per company guideline I don’t blame you for posting as you did and cancelling. Honestly, yellow pages has no relevance anymore, and the reason they charge so much is to cover all those executive payrolls. As far as failing to follow up on issues like yours, I can tell you I dealt with many customers in similar situations as yours and it broke my heart at the lack of accountability on the part of yellow pages. There are many ways your wife can drive her business at a much cheaper cost.
Busted!
Take that YP
I have advertised with phone book companies in the past with poor results
and have found it not worth the investment but found that when it comes time to pay up they will vigorously pursue you with lawsuits if you fail to pay up even if their ad netted you zero in work
I recently was approached by YP to advertise and I said Nope!
Kudos to you for calling them out
Phone book / Internet ad advertising isn’t worth the large investment
Word of mouth is still by far the best advertising there is and its allot cheaper making your profit margins allot larger