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“After two months - two and a half months - I realized I didn’t get even a single job,” said Singh. Over the phone, Harmeet Singh, owner of Burnaby-based Centrum Electric Ltd., signed up for Yellow Pages digital advertising services for $250 a month. Unpaid invoices get followed up with automated calls, collection notices and legal threats. The stories vary, but they typically feature the same complaints: misleading sales information and unclear business terms, an immense struggle to contact a customer service representative and charges for services the customer believes were not agreed to. “It’s unbelievable how they can conduct their business like that and still be in business.” Same complaints “It’s unbelievable,” said Wayne Lackner, owner of Urban Cedarworks Ltd. These make up 97 per cent of the 157 reviews logged on the site at the time of writing. “As professionals working with professionals, we focus on added value and clear business agreements,” wrote the company.īut a dozen former Yellow Pages clients who shared their stories with Business in Vancouver disagree, as do the hundreds of individuals and small-business owners who have logged complaints with BBB, on Facebook and Google, and with review websites such as SiteJabber, where the company has 152 one-star reviews. In the email, the company responded to small-business owners’ concerns by stating that each case is different, that their customers always come first and that their customer service department investigates instances of customer dissatisfaction and provides remedies. Yellow Pages, headquartered in Montreal, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but eventually provided written answers to a list of questions by email through a representative of public relations firm National. “Everyone I talk to, I say, ‘Please stay away from Yellow Pages.’ This was the biggest mistake that I made in opening my business.” “It is a hardship for a small business, their first year, to pay an extra thousand dollars,” she said.

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When she tried, she said, a Yellow Pages representative told her she had agreed to a full year of services and that she could only upgrade her monthly plan. When she signed up for monthly digital advertising services with Yellow Pages, Laundrie Krokis said, she was promised she could change the terms of her plan at any time.

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“It would cost me maybe like $1,000 to buy out my contract for what I had left, and it would probably cost me $1,000 in lawyer’s fees, plus my headache,” explained Jacqueline Laundrie Krokis, the owner of Jack Pine Dental Hygiene in Slave Lake, Alta. Often, however, the threat of legal action, the risk to a company’s credit rating and the sheer cost of disputing a small claim in court have pushed business owners to simply settle the claims against them and move on. The company has hundreds of negative online reviews and an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) it has also been involved in hundreds of lawsuits across Canada.īoth customers and lawyers question the legal validity of what are typically verbal, over-the-phone agreements between small-business owners and Yellow Pages. Yellow Pages Ltd., once the country’s largest publisher of telephone directories, has taken aggressive steps to reinvent itself as a digital advertising platform - but current and former customers say this strategy includes locking them into contracts they did not agree to and threatening them with lawsuits and collection notices until they pay for services they do not want.

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