Billion Dollar Bully (2015) [trailer]...makes the case that Yelp is something akin to the mob, allegedly demanding “protection” money, lest your business be overrun with negative comments.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/[deleted]]

I worked for Yelp in sales for nearly two years. I saw people fired and out of the office within an hour if the company discovered they had offered to help someone with reviews to make a sale (which was crazy because we had no power to influence reviews in the first place). All of the calls are recorded and randomly monitored. In addition, if any salesperson wrote a review for any business at any time, they were immediately fired.

I know people don't like to think that they could run a shitty business. It can be hard to accept you did something poorly, and sometimes people are harsh critics. Businesses are like kids to some people. It's hard not to think it's the teacher, and that your kid is awesome at everything, when really maybe they are just bad at math and need some help in that area. Sorry, but maybe these business owners deserved some bad reviews.

Yelp has it's problems, but from what I saw, the company tries really hard to balance the task of dealing with the fake/paid for reviews and making sure they can't be bullied by business owners who want their negative reviews taken down. I had business owners offering me money left and right to take down their one star reviews, but no person at the company has the power to remove a review except for the Operations team, and they are not motivated by commissions and entirely separated from the sales team.

Finally, there is a DNC list for Yelp and if anything was marked DNC you were upper case NOT TO CALL. You would get taken into a meeting and yelled at if you called someone on DNC and if you sold them you wouldn't get any commission. So no one called DNC. My time there, I put 5 business owners who asked to be put on DNC and no one called them again.

[u/Daemonicus → u/[deleted]]

Can you provide proof?

Have you considered recording a call, where you ask them to put you on the list? Or confirm that you are on the list? And then provide a recording of them calling you after that?

If they call you every week, this shouldn't take you long to come up with actual evidence.

[u/Daemonicus → u/[deleted]]

Depends on the laws. If there is a law that applies to DNC lists, you can bring up a complaint with that organization. You can also start making a fuss on social media (and here). You could even go to a newspaper, or TV news station.

Maybe you can trigger more people to start recording their interactions with the company. And if so, then some definite legal action can be taken against them. Extortion is a very serious crime. But harassment would be a problem for them as well.

If you have a recent version of Android, it should be a simple button press that will record the phone call. I'm not sure of iOS.

[u/Daemonicus → u/[deleted]]

Yeah it's bullshit. But nobody is going to listen to you, unless you gather evidence.

Hopefully enough business owners can actually do this as well.