Complaint Review: YellowBook

I had taken a break from advertising with Yellow Book last year, I was afraid that it would be a huge risk but did it anyway. We have two phone directories delivered in Sheboygan Wisconsin, the other which is AT&T. I continued advertising with AT&T yellow pages last year, my idea was to see if business would be affected by advertising in only of the directories. It was a rather slow year last year, but it is hard to say that it was the lack of advertising with Yellow Book because the economy did slow down also.

    In October I was contacted by a sales rep., from Yellow Book and I decided that I would advertise with them this year. The sales rep., presented me with the call tracking option which was explained that a special phone number would established and placed in the advertisements. I was hesitant at first because I believe when customers thumb through the yellow pages looking for services they are going to call the business with a recongnizable phone prefix first. I think that phone prefixes that are unfamiliar to a customer give the impression that the company may not be local and the services may not be fast and reliable.

    So anyway I put my procrastination aside and went with the call tracking service. While online paying my bill with Yellow Book I noticed that they have the call tracking service logged on-line for advertising customers to review. These calls are logged their fullest extent, they even have the call recorded which you can listen to. I made a printed copy of the log and began reviewing the telephone numbers and to my surprise over 80% of the calls I received were customers that I have established over the five of being in business. Out of the 80% of these calls a majority of them are snow plowing calls and not related to my electrical business.

I do not advertise the snow plowing business in any phone directory, this advertising is strictly done through the local newspaper. My determination is that Yellow Book is not only tracking the calls that come from the special assigned phone number that they place in their customers advertizement but they tracking the standard business phone also to make their tracking look good. I will never use this tracking service again, it should be tracking only the calls made from the assigned phone number that was placed in my advertisements with Yellow Book. This tracking services is good info in regards to the advertisements that I pay for with Yellow Book. There has to be something that can be done with this sort of deceptive sales pitch.