"If you really want to know, look in the Mirror" - or not as the case may be

The great thing about the profession I work in is that every day will bring about new challenges.

Take this morning for instance, when I arrived in the office I was greeted with an email saying that the Mirror had run an article on UFindUs which was less than complimentary. At the end of the day we appreciate that papers have to sell copies to survive, a bit like us selling new packages to customers and retaining old customers year on year, but sat here at my desk which overlooks the credit control team I saw an article that was certainly not representative of the current situation. As newspapers seem less interested in selling stories phrased in a way that show the facts more clearly I thought it would be an idea to cover off a few of the points mentioned.

We can still rightly maintain that we are a popular choice as far as business directories go. Whilst we don’t propose to be as large as Yell, UFindUs are certainly much bigger than the likes of the orange pages, who relish every opportunity to try to perpetuate the impression that we are poor firm to deal with. That may have something to do with the fact that our directory, as a for instance, received (21/11/06) an average of 2.2 page views per million users compared with their 0.4 page views per million. On the same day we had a daily reach of 60 users per million compared with their figure of under 5 users per million.

As regards our profits, the figures mentioned were for the whole group, and given the fact Iomart own many different companies that in turn have many different brands the contribution from UFindUs is only a portion of this.

A lot of our UFindUs business will come from “cold” rather than “warm” leads and we would rather think of them as a sales team rather than give the impression they are an “army” out on maneuvers. In the past there was more chance that our sales people could have over sold the product and possibly not have made sure that the customer was fully aware of the terms and conditions. This has all changed, staff receive more training, and our sales managers have worked hard to bring about a change of attitude towards the job in the sales staff which have resulted in lower instances of complaints.

Two of the three customers featured have had refunds agreed before the article was published and we believe that these matters have now been resolved using the channels we already have in place. Unfortunately one of the customers still has issues which I personally am now looking into and I believe a satisfactory resolution is about to be achieved regarding this matter.

As for the comments that were made by our Finance Director, Richard Logan, well the heavily edited responses couldn’t have been painted in a less flattering way.

It is true to say that we have in the past had a problem over taking payments that shouldn’t have been taken, this was sorted in the summer and for customers who have come on board recently they have had within their terms and conditions a cooling off period

Too little too late? I don’t think so. These along with many other changes are making Iomart and UFindUs a much stronger business, with a greater customer focus. We have a very small proportion of problem accounts, and as much as we would like it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but what we can do for unhappy customers is listen, learn and act appropriately.

Graham Armstrong
Senior Customer Relations Manager
Accountability Department
UFindUs Ltd