So my business was visited by a sales representative of Yellowbook back in late 2011. We were a bit unsure about advertising with them as we were told many bad stories about them but offered to listen to his pitch. He told us that our local area ad would be considered our home base ad and if we wanted to advertise in a town about an hours drive away it would be considered a foreign market and we could do that at a half off price if we signed up now.
As a new business we thought okay well let's get our name out there locally first and then out to the larger cities that surrounded us. So we signed up for local only with the option to go to the "foreign market" in the near future. We give him a deposit check for 1/3 of the price and he leaves.
A few weeks later we were presented with ana phone call from this representative telling us that we should be receiving a proof in the mail and should make corrections and sent them back in. We made our corrections and mailed the proofs in. We inquired about an ad with the foreign market and he tells us the price of that ad... Well we ask does that reflect the half off price and he says that he can not give us a half off price for a foreign market. We ask why he told us he could and he tells us we must have misunderstood what he meant. Now three grown adults (myslef and my two business partners) misunderstanding half off in a foreign market is hard to believe.
Another few weeks go by and we receive an email from our rep telling us that he has our ads and for us to look them over and let us know if they are okay. Well to our surprise we see that the ads he has are the original ads and not our corrected ones. So we scan in our corrected ad and mail them to him telling him that the ones he had were not what we wanted and here are the correct ones and to please call us should he need any more info.
Now another week or so goes by and he sends us an email saying okay these are the proofs I send off to the team for print, blah blah blah. We look at the ads and oh yes you guessed it... Still the original ads. So we call the rep and he tells us that there is nothing he can do about it now since they have already been sent to the printer and then tells us that we had plenty of time to make changes if we wanted to and it was not his fault that the ads were in correct?!? Really?
So we talk to his manager and we ultimately explain the situation and send her copies of every email we had with him to her. We are then told she would review the info and get back to us. Never hear from her... We send another email to her and she says that she is turning it over to their investigation team and we should hear from them in 5-7 business days... Nothing ever comes.
Needless to say we never heard back from them since and now they want us to pay the other 2/3 of the bill and we have sent them in a refusal to pay letter until this matter is resolved... This was met with well if you don't pay your bill in a timely manner then you will accrue late fees and ultimately be turned over to a collection agency for payment... Really this all could have been resolved had thier rep been doing his job properly, not lied to us, and handled our account the way a professional should have.in any event we have stood our ground and requested that their investigations team actually look into the matter and offer us some kind of solution as we do not think we should pay for an ad that was misprinted after we sent off multiple changes and because the ad was printed incorrectly it has not generated any business calls for us!
Beware of Yellowbook! Run as fast and as far away from them as you can!
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