Thought I'd heard 'em all:-)

> Hi guys!

Hi Lisa!

> New poster here....

Welcome. Put on your thick skin... text writing has no tone and can easily be mis-understood :o)

> had to respond
> to this as a former yellow page advertising
> exec! :)

Advertising Exec? What is that? Is that a fancy term for someone who sells Yellow Pages advertising? Or is that someone who "manages" the salesmen and women? (BTW... we - me in particular - don't believe on PC.)

> We actually "partnered" so to
> speak, with the phone company and did a
> Guaranteed Ad Program with our
> customers....they would be assigned a # that
> would only appear in the phone directory
> that we published; the calls to this # would
> be tracked and the customer could actually
> SEE how many calls they were receiving from
> our directory every month. If they did not
> receive the agreed upon call count, they
> were prorated a refund...win/win!

Let me get this straight... YOU (as in the YP) teamed up with the phone company to track the client's phone calls. IF the number of calls received by the client did not match the mutually agreed upon number (agreed upon number based on ad size, I assume) then the client would get that month's worth of advertising refunded. Is that right?

The people offering the guarantee were also the ones doing the monitoring? Oh gee. Excuse me for my doubt... but can't you just see it... "Hey guys, Bob's Meats hasn't received the agreed upon call numbers for the month... quick... make some calls to bump his numbers up so we don't have to refund the money."

I suppose they paid extra for the "guarantee" too, right?

Don't get me wrong... performance guarantees are great. In this case, however, there are some serious issues. After all, the YP was in partnership with the phone company.

Anyway. Looked at your sorta-website. What on Earth is "Total Quality Management"? Sounds like a load of high-falut'n corporate gobble-de-gook to me. I'm serious... what is "Total Quality Management"?

Michael Ross


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