Complaint Review: Smart Business Contacts Inc. - New York NY

I have never in my life left a negative review for any business but Smart Business Contacts has left me no choice. I've been trying to get a refund from Smart Business Contacts for over two months now and they are literally ignoring me.  I usually call or email at least once a day (I have it all documented) and in the rare ocassion I actually get someone to pick up the phone, it's the same thing every time: "I will get someone to call you back within 10-15 minutes". It's surprising to me that they are still operating and haven't been shut down.  Here's how we got to this point. 

It all started with an automated email message from a list provider. I met Alan who was more than happy to do business. I gave him the specific criteria I was looking for in the Dental industry and specifically told him the criteria of what we were looking for and who we weren't looking for, and he agreed to everything and kept telling me "no problem".  At this point, Alan followed up so frequently I almost couldn't avoid his phone calls. 

Fast forward a few days, and this is where it gets interesting. Alan insists we pay bank wire transfer of $3,289 over to their company, but we ended up mailing a check. He asked it gets rushed to them via FedEx but we had already mailed it. Upon receiving the list, I get an email from their "data team" with a spreadsheet attached to it. Since I asked for one person per company, the first thing I did was remove duplicates from the street address column. Like magic, a list size of 36,000 instantly gets reduced by almost 20,000, leaving the net total around 17,000. Upon looking through the titles of the contacts I received, there were a ton of titles that were not supposed to be there - people who we would never do business with - like HR, Finance, Legal, Assistants, etc.  

While I'm working with Smart Business Contacts to replace these bad titles, we had filtered down the remaining list of 17,000 to only the titles we cared about, which brought it down to about 10,000. The whole purpose for buying this list was to use it for a Dental Summit we would be attending. Once we sent to this list, it bounced at OVER 50%!! (VERY different than their "GUARNTEED" 95% deliverability). Our sender reputation took a HUGE hit from this. When I called Alan to tell him the news, he said they would make things right and give us additional verified contacts. As if things weren't bad enough, things got worse...much worse.  

I had - again - given Alan the exact criteria we were looking for (since it seemed like he wasn't paying attention the first couple of times) and when the list was re-delivered, I ran the same deduplication of addresses and all the contacts from the same location were still in there. Unbelievable.  Alan must have known this, since he started avoiding my calls at this point. At this point, I got fed up and asked for a refund, well within the "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" range of time.  After calling Alan more than ten times in one day, he picked up and was talking to me like nothing was wrong. When I requested a refund, he went super unprofessional and started yelling at me, raising his voice and saying things like "you've got to be kidding me". I asked if I could speak with a manager and he let me know he was the owner. I'm no business expert, but probably not the best way to treat a customer that has been more than patient with your mistakes.  

I will call or email almost every day and I get almost no response. This business is presented online as some huge company but I think it's 2 or 3 guys that dodge calls and pass the phone around to each other. There's a guy named David and one named Austin I've talked to as well and they also screen my calls. 

I asked for a service and you couldn't deliver. Our problem still isn't solved so please give us our money back so we can give it to someone who is willing to pay attention to what the customer wants instead of make a quick sale. 

Not only would I not recommend doing business with this company to another business looking for data or anything else they offer, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.  After searching other review sites, I now realize I'm not alone.  If I had seen these I would have never done business. Don't make the same mistake. You've been warned.