Thought I'd heard 'em all:-)

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the welcome! Glad to be a part of this forum.

Hope you put on your extra layer of skin today as well!

"Advertising Exec" was merely a generalized term I used in order to get my point across, which, by the way, was not supposed to be a discussion of my former title. But, hey, I'm game for any discussion!

Total Quality Manager, which I'm sure does sound a bit "high-falut'n", but then don't most things in the corporate world?? The idea behind Total Quality Management is mainly "continuous improvement" both internal & external. In other words insuring that things run as smooth as possible both for the customer and inside the company, ie. workflows of all departments, etc. The TQM generally answers only to the President, or in my case, the GM, and therefore has the responsibility of everyone below him to different extents. Hope this clears it up a bit for you.

Now, on to the issue of the ad guarantee. These monthly reports could be accessed by the customer at any time during the month. Any call that came into his business by the assigned telephone # would be on that report. We only "counted" calls that were over a certain # of minutes long, meaning these were most likely ones that were customers or potential customers. So, if the report total was, say, 63, we only counted ones that were over 3-4 minutes long. I think that shows the fairness to some extent. The report shows the name & number that called, the time of day & length of the call, whether or not the call was answered or if the business line was busy and also showed the zip code of the incoming call. Kinda hard to rig that! Oh, and no....the guarantee & the monitoring were not coming from the same people. WE, as in the yp company, gave the guarantee; the phone company sets up the # and anyone, including the customer who has the passcode, can monitor the calls coming in.

My "sorta" website is still in the building stages. I went with one design, then after lots of researching and taking advice from others, I decided a different design would work better. Hey, thanks for visiting it though!!!

By the way, Michael, just for kicks....what is your title??

Lisa

> Hi Lisa!

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

> 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.)

> 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