Just Dial

Just dial, the company that offers directory service via phone for free is utter fraud one. In this blog I will be writing my experience wit that company.

I had a commercial company called Mind As Lab, now it solely concentrates on providing free software on Linux. When it was a commercial venture, it designed websites using PHP and catered clients. It was nice business. I was running it for a while and then I got a call from this Justdial. They wanted details about my business and readily gave it. They said it was all free then the bugging began.

A week or two after I first gave my details, a call fro Justdial arrived. They said they have lot of business offers for me, they will be happy to route their call about web-designing to me, but I need to pay money for that. Well, my developers were already stretched and I said no thanks, but they kept pressing in the next few calls which followed next few weeks that they will give the business to my competitors.

Well, I did not form Mind As Lab  to crush competition, in fact much of my developers were encouraged by me to work in more than one company and to wet their feet in more than one technology. Even if I happen to get that business, I need to expand my facility, do all sort of management tasks which I hate and I said no thanks once again.

But their stupid calls came pouring in, and one day unable to bear their torture I asked who are my competitors? And they went mute. Time passed and I once again got call fro Justdial. This time the operator asked weather I was running a medical lab. Sure the name Mind As Lab as confused her. I corrected her and said to her that I am not interested in local market, I was aiming for overseas and local market served less than 5% of our business.

Then again and again they bugged me, they were purely unable understand business logic. They seem to think I was a person who liked uncontrolled growth. So I asked them do they really have business for me and they said yes in a really positive way. I offered them that I will open my accounts for them,  for every business I get from them, I will pay 15% of the profits to them and if they can ink a deal with me that they can guarantee so much income I can begin the expansion of my business just like just dial envisions it. To my surprise they refused.

Why did they refuse? Were they lying to me about the business offers they give to me? Or what else? something is fishy here.

Justdial works in a stupid way. If you search for a business it in or call it, it does not recommend the best business but it recommends the one that has paid the highest to it. Those that don’t pay almost never gets recommended. Some of the businesses in its database are obsolete! Almost any one can rate a business in its website, not the one who is or was the customer of that particular business listing. In fact they have no way to ensure the  quality of service and authenticity of businesses and customer ratings they put up on their page.

Justdial is a good idea, but very bad and buggy implementation and they don’t take responsibility for anything that goes wrong.