Whilst the snow is falling outside and the office is quiet, I thought I would blog about my ever continuing struggle with Yell.com/Yellow Pages. You know, that company famous for having an ever shrinking directory of business listings that is used primarily to prop up table legs and allow short boys to kiss tall girls.

When we setup Orbits, we looked at all traditional marketing techniques, from flyers and newspapers to directory listings online. As an IT company though, it doesn’t take a genius to realise that a lot of people who need our services will use the tool that 80% off the world uses, GOOGLE! However, we didn’t want to discount any options without trying them so we duly spoke with Yell.com who gave us the big sell about how well their book does and how beneficial their services are for Search Engine Optimisation online etc. Unconvinced, we agreed to a meeting with one of their sales agents to look at a listing. Meeting time arrived and no one came and no one called to apologise/cancel- not a great impression and confirmed we had no wish to work with them. If it had ended there then all well and good, no business, but no hard feelings either. Alas, no that’s where the saga begins.

Where online directories are concerned, there are plenty of free ones and a couple of paid for ones which we find useful. One free one in particular is Gumtree.com which allows you to post regularly to a target area. We use this for our domestic services which are not our main focus, but it provides a nice side line. So off we go posting regularly on Gumtree, and we soon realised that you could guarantee that within 10 minutes of the posting going live the phone would ring and a pleasant voice would start extolling the virtues of a certain Yell.com.

The first couple of times I politely told them that I had no interest in their service and went on to explain about the missed appointment etc. You would think that would be the end of it, not quite! Next day same thing, another Gumtree ad, another voice selling me something I had no interest in. I like to think I’m quite a placid person but it soon got me riled up, even more so when I asked the next few ‘agents’ to remove me from my list, which one said they would do, and several said they had no list or no facility to remove me from a list if there even was one!!

And so it continued, on an almost daily basis (not because Yell.com didn’t call every time I posted an ad, but because some days I didn’t post one!) My next tack was to ask them about the telephone preference service and whether if we signed up we would still get the calls. Their answer – that won’t stop the calls because you are putting your number in the public domain and we have every right to call you. I understand this to be a lie, unethical and possibly unlawful.

Not doing yourselves any favours are you Yell.com.

So that didn’t help, and neither did being sharp with the agents and telling them politely to Sod Off! I thought if they would waste my time I’d do the same and chat away pleasantly for a few minutes, lead them into thinking I wanted to waste my money with them and their services and then put them on hold for a few minutes, we don’t have a hold feature so I just sang The Pogues classic Fairytale of New York at them to keep them in the festive spirit.

This is where the power of Twitter becomes apparent. Having got nowhere with these ‘agents’, I twittered out my frustrations and awarded Yell.com the Orbits Worst Company on Earth award, which was the first time it hadn’t been won by BT since records began!

Shortly afterwards their twitter rep got in touch and I was greeted this morning by a phone call from Yell which wasn’t a waste of my time. A most pleasant lady from their customer services department called to apologise and look into it. She gave me her details and said if they call again to take names and details and get back to her. IF they call again? Of course they will call again – not least because 2 minutes after I spoke to her I posted on gumtree again. I call this Yell fishing and it wasn’t long before I got a bite. Good ol’ Roger was soon offering me listings here there and everywhere. Took his details down as politely as I could and then explained I had just been on the phone to Customer Services and would be passing his and his managers details on to them. He said he could solve the problem there and then – joy of joys I thought – how could he do this magic? By giving me a free listing in Yell.com! I think not my good man, I would rather feature on the sex offenders register than that excuse for a service!

Passed details on to Customer Services who soon got in touch to say they would be issuing an email to instruct agents not to call Orbits again, but I may still get calls for a few weeks – whilst they train staff to read I presume!!

Customer Services also said this was the first time they had heard of a problem like this? Surely that can’t be true, there are many regular posters on Gumtree offering services, are they not being called daily? Do they have some magic way of deterring Yell? If you have had constant calls from Yell.com then please post below and tell us about it.

I can understand they need to try and sell their service (their market is shrinking faster than a slug in salt) but to blindly call Gumtree posters and harass them does them no good.

I will update this blog as the saga continues…I’m now off to kiss a tall girl with my yellow pages in hand…..!