Hi! I’m Bobby Cox and one of my roles at WhitePages is to make sure that we’re providing the best support and assistance to our many customers. On a daily basis, my Team is working hard to meet and exceed our customers expectations by answering questions, responding to emails and ensuring that all of our customers have an enjoyable experience. I volunteered to write this post based on a common customer inquiry that just won’t seem to go away. Rather than deal with this inquiry on an individual customer basis, I thought I’d share with a broader audience…hopefully it helps.
Every so often, we receive inquiries from customers about sales calls they received from “White Pages”. Importantly, these sales calls are NOT from our company, WhitePages, Inc. The people making these calls are scam artists engaging in what is called “phishing“. ‘Phishing’ is a credit card theft scam that uses the household brand names of WhitePages, and YellowPages, to establish trust, then try to get people to provide their credit card information over the phone. This is a scam. If you get a call like this, tell the caller that you will track down their location and report them to the FTC and FBI if they call back. Unfortunately, this is an empty threat as the numbers they use are most likely faked due to something called “CallerID spoofing” and it’s almost certain the callers are overseas…but it may keep these folks from pestering you again.
And on a side note, please be very careful when somebody that you don’t know asks you for your credit card information over the phone. While we’d all like to believe that all people are trustworthy and honest, unfortunately it’s simply not the case. Better to be safe than sorry.
We’ll continue to post service announcements such as this one, when appropriate. Just felt like this type of thing seems to be occuring more frequently and wanted to make sure all of you knew about it.
Questions, comments, concerns? Feel free to post a comment below.
Bobby
Note: This post is the 11th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Ben Maldonado who is one of a number of rockstar web developers at WhitePages. Ben has worked with individuals across the company to help bring the new WhitePages brand, and site, to life. He’s also been doing a ton of dancing.
When I was first approached to become part of the brand team I was very excited. As part of our brand identity changes, we would be doing a major overhaul of the site’s look and feel. It seemed like an appropriate time to also review our current code-base since it was starting to show its age.
Two of our brand pillars which are “Relevant Innovation” and “Intuitive Experiences” were aligned with this effort. A new code base would allow us to be faster and more agile then we had in the past which would result in a richer, more intuitive experience for our users.
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There’s been a lot of activity this week around the WhitePages Caller ID app!
After getting the good news that the app would be featured in the Android Market this week, we got another unexpected surprise.
WhitePages at Google I/O Conference
Google I/O is a developer conference in San Francisco that took place May 27-28. On Memorial Day, our contact at Google shot us a note saying one of the developers planned to demo at Google I/O couldn’t make it, and asked if we could fill in. We jumped into action! Within 24 hours we had marketing assets to Google, booked travel and had a plan for Kevin Nakao and I to cover the two day event on Wednesday and Thursday. Not fully prepared for marketing Caller ID at a trade show or hobnobbing with some of the sharpest technologists around, we didn’t know what to expect.
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Note: This post is the 10th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Joe Heitzeberg who is our VP of Tech at WhitePages. He is charged with delivering the services and offerings that power the WhitePages experience, running a scaleable and efficient infrastructure and building and maintaining a top-notch tech team.
What is Agile Software Development?
I start this blog post off by revealing a secret: I nearly always ask interview candidates to define what Agile is, and the more prescriptive and exacting their answer, the lower the score they tend to get. You see, for WhitePages, Agile is not a prescriptive, exacting process and ruleset, it is a set of general principles and themes — much like branding.
If you’ve been following along with the brand building series, then you may see this and other parallels.
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As a mom, I have to say: I’m disappointed. But as a product owner for the most popular people search site on the Internet, I’m at least glad that we’re helping people to connect with confidence.
Beyond our expected growth rate, we saw a relatively significant bump in both unique visitors (+7%) and people searches (+10%) in the week leading up to Mother’s Day. Apparently, people don’t know their mother’s addresses and phone numbers. Nice.
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OK. Back in January I wrote about why people really don’t need paper phone books and how continuing to print these phone books is a massive drain on the environment. Well, it looks as if AT&T is under the same impression and is working tirelessly to rid themselves of the phone book printing burden.
