lokaldelen
reality check
I received the funniest phone call today.
A women, introducing herself with “Hi, I’m Anna from Lokaldelen, this will cost you nothing and isn’t about advertisements. Can I get two minutes from you?” was in a serious hurry to find out some crucial information. Nice as I am, I kindly let her continue to describe her matter, and here goes the conversation in brief:
P: Hello, it’s Petter.
A: Hi, I’m Anna from Lokaldelen, this will cost you nothing and isn’t about advertisements. Can I get two minutes from you?
P: Yes, sure.
A: Ok, this won’t cost you anything, I’m just calling on behalf of Lokaldelen and now we’re moving to “internet“, problem is that a lot of our information is outdated. We already have a printed version but now when we’re moving to “internet” we would like to know if the information we have is correct.
P: Ok.
A: So, you company name is ambadoo?
P: Yeah.
A: Your main number is 073 08 22 240?
P: Yep.
A: Can you describe your business?
P: If you check our website you find out, and this phone call will turn into comedy.
A: Well, I don’t have access to internet. (So, let me ask here. You’re working with internet, but don’t have access to it?)
A: So, you have a website?
P: Yes, and there you can find out why this phone call will become irrelevant soon.
A: And the web address is… ambadoo? dot ? se ?
P: dot com
A: And your company address is Sundspromenaden 1, 21116 Malmö?
P: Ya.
A: Ok, I’d like to thank for your time and…
P: So, now you’ve taken two of my minutes, and I’d like to take two of yours.
P: Let me explain what we do. ambadoo is a self-updatable address book, that let you get contact details automatically, to your system, so that you don’t have to call me and ask if it’s correct, hence saving you and your company lots of time and money.
A: Ooh. That sounds fantastic, I’m waiting for it already and I wish it will be implemented here soon.
P: Me too.
A: Thanks for your time.
P: No worries, you made my day.
I couldn’t stop laughing after hanging up. It’s incredible. A business index sales-woman calls you up, telling you that the database is filled with crap. Just the fact that they call you up, take yours, and their time, just to check if they’ve got correct information is worrying. There’s no system they can assure the contact information is up-to-date. So, what if we decide to move, change number and name of the business tomorrow. What do they do? Call us up again? Intriguing.
Imagine how many companies a day they can call. A quick calc on a basis that every phone call takes 3 min, 20 companies an hour, 160 companies a day… for one person. There’s about 900.000 companies in sweden. So, in rough numbers it would take Lokaldelen 5625 days, with one employed to get their system updated. Imagine they’re 20 calling and it’s still 281 days to make all the calls, and when updated they’d most likely have to start over.
It’s not an easy task, and I’m impressed that they actually do try to make an effort to get their system up-to-date. I really hope she does remember both my 1 minute pitch and our name, and she’ll call back when they run out of credit. We’re here to solve their problem too, as much as everyone’s else. Lokaldelen, as other developers, will be able to access data from our system through our Open API. Meaning they can concentrate on building a their site, focusing on good user-experience, instead of spending valuable time on making useless calls to check information that could be updated automatically.
Next time I’ll call them, asking if can get two minutes of theirs, to save them days, weeks and loads of calls to get a system that are updated. Not just when they hang up, but all the time.