Lollipop Local

Further to my post about my paid Yell ad problems, the promised return call on the Monday did not materialise. Nor did a response to my email after their automated acknowledgement on the Friday.

With an ad that was only showing for one keyword in one town, I was not about to let things lie, so I called them again on Tuesday morning. The landline number I had been given – it was not visible anywhere in my profile dashboard – was continually engaged. So, again, I looked up web design in Southend to get their freephone number from the listing that was ranking way above mine.

A new operative looked back at the notes and said that a representative was due to call me about the possible misselling of locations issue, which is when I put him straight about the fact that I could not access my listing from the dashboard to edit it, nor could anyone click through to an enhanced profile from the one visible ad. I also pointed out that my free listing seemed to have disappeared.

After a few minutes, he admitted that my free listing was no longer there and he had no idea why that would be. He told me that I would have to speak to the free listing side of the business to get it set up again.

So, having spent over an hour setting up and optimising my free listing, they had produced the paid listing based on it. And I had spent another hour optimising the keyword section of the paid ad. And now they had lost my free listing. Well, obviously, they just needed to copy the paid listing into the free section.

Not so fast, Ms Lollipop! It doesn’t work that way. When I got very cross, customer services passed me through to their ‘Resolution’ team. He immediately offered to refund the four months for which I had already paid but was unable to reproduce my free listing. I would have to speak to the free listing team and lose even more time.

I explained that I was going on holiday but, because I wanted the listing sorted, they could call me on the Wednesday when I would stop what I was doing to give them all the information that they could actually take from the sponsored listing.

So they called on the Tuesday when I was driving to my holiday destination and, despite my request that they call back the next day, a week later they still have not got around to it.

I can now see on my profile dashboard that the payments have been amended so that I will get a refund of part of the money and reduced direct debits for the rest.

If you have an ad with Yell, make sure you check it regularly to ensure that it is showing for the town you have paid for and also for the town in which you are located.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2012 at 9:29 am and is filed under Local Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.