After 12 years, I'm kissing goodbye to our Yellow Pages ad. For a service business a Yellow Pages ad is usually a good investment but I've decided to save 15k by skipping it this year. There's a number of reasons for this;
Lousy Service
A couple of days ago, our rep left a message "your deadline is approaching. Call me back because I'm too busy and won't get time to call you before the books close."
Great service I have to say, but given the way Sensis operate I can barely blame the poor girl.
I subscribe to the Sensis job alerts as I'm always hoping to find a corporate gig suited for a forty something nervous wreck who's been broken by customers.
I've noticed Sensis are constantly advertising for reps. It's not surprising they have to keep advertising given the job pays 58k if you make your targets. That is not good money for a barrel load of stress and a lot of hard work.
But that's a problem for the reps and their bosses. None of that would really matter if I were getting a good return. Sadly, the inquiries we get through the YP these days generally doesn't attract the right customers.
Customer types
In our line of work, the Yellow Pages attracts too many tyre kickers and too many panic merchants.
The panic merchants ignore strange noises and error messages until their computer blows up.
This usually happens at 3am the night before their tax return and their daughter's PHD thesis is due.
This of course wouldn't be so bad if the buggers wanted to pay for emergency service at 3am. But they'll either hang up when you tell them the price or never pay the bill.
Tyre kicking types might not ring at 3am, but they are a bigger waste of time.
A favourite trick of these folk is to make a booking then continue ringing around until they find someone cheaper. They then cancel your booking, often five minutes before the tech arrives.
Category Bloat
I've mentioned previously the Yellow Pages has too many categories. When you have to decide between seven different categories it becomes a gamble. Unless of course you want to spend 100k+ putting for a small ad in all seven.
Of course for some businesses, this is not a problem. Particularly if Sensis give you your ads for free.
The Yellow Pages is our competitor
Why give money to your competitor? Sensis bought their own IT support business, Invizage, a few years back.
Like The Trading Post it's gone nowhere since. But it still rankles me they decided to compete in my field. Even more so when their reps try to steal my customers during their advertising sales pitch.
I also bet Invizage get their quarter page display ads in twenty different categories for a good deal less than the millions of dollars it would cost me.
Price
The price is also a sticking point. It seems to jump every year and has always been my biggest single marketing cost. Although I don't begrudge that if it generates enough leads.
Clunky systems
For a company that claims to be at the forefront of Internet search and online services, their systems are a quaint throw back to the 1950s.
When you call them, you can't do anything until a rep spends some time with you. It seems their idea of selling is to make your head spin with different options.
The problem is small business owners simply don't have the time for this. If they made online ordering available. It would improve their service out of sight, be a cheaper channel and small business owners would jump at it.
They'd probably sell more too. I know plenty of business owners who would go mad optioning up their ads. They certainly do it when they order online with Dell.
Not only would they have lower costs, they'd have a higher sell through rate. They could also use their online service to push extras like Sensis Search and Invizage.
If they had a concept of service, they'd sell more, spend less and probably have fewer double handling and communication stuff ups.
I've always loved their idea of service. Visit their update your listing page. Not only do you have to call them, but the free and paid listing service hours and number are identical.
Good product differentiation there. I'm sure it's never occurred to their senior managers to give paying customers better support than the freebie customers.
It's a shame Yellow Pages can't do with a forty something victim of the IT wars. They might learn something.
But in the meantime, they'll have to do without my modest 15k for this year's ad.
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2 comments:
I will declare upfront I am a faithful Sensis staff member.
It is always disappointing to lose a customer and to hear bad service stories. Although the service you say you received unfortunately doesn’t reflect it, for Yellow, every customer counts (and 15 K is a significant sum of money).
We know that customers need to see a return on their investment and they want Yellow to deliver the right customers to them. This is the basis of our business.
National research on Yellow users doesn’t match your view of delivering tyre kickers. It says that more than 90% of people who search for businesses using Yellow, contact a business, and more than 70% of those go on to make a purchase from that business.
Although unfortunately it may be too late since you’ve already said “Bye bye Yellow”, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t alert you to the fact that, although we believe strongly in the effectiveness of Yellow directories, we are not complacent.
We are working hard to be more useful to customers and deliver more value to customers. For example, we are working towards delivering “self service” type online ordering, we are focussing on how better ad design can be used to deliver the right customers to businesses like yours, and we have a major process and system review and overhaul underway which will help us to “sell more and spend less” (as you say in your blog) and importantly, to provide better customer service.
So – we are sorry to lose your custom and hope we can win you back soon.
We were thinking of breaking up with the YP print directory last year, because like the Cranky Tech, did not believe we were getting value for money from the ad. Our rep sold us on the concept of a monitored number for the YP book, so we could accurately determine how effective it was. Lo and behold, it didn't happen, and they ran the ad with our local number, not even or 1800 number, without approval. Before the print copy came out, we also signed up for a programme called ClickManager!, a 'sponsored link' programme for Google, Yahoo, Sensis and MSN? Again they activated the programme without our input, and rather than getting hits from a range of search engines, more than 90% in our first month were from Sensis! Google have more than 90% of the search engine traffic market, so we were seriously annoyed. Sensis are great at selling and taking money out of your account, and even 'double dipping' with ClickManager (we also pay for Sensis online ads), but very short on value for money.
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