Signpost

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DO BUSINESS HERE!
I received a random sales call from this company, SIGNPOST. Apparently a guy named *. I asked if it was a sales call as I was busy, he replied yes. I said I was not interested and hung up the phone. 10 minutes later I received a NEW REVIEW ON GOOGLE. It was * the sales guy for SIGNPOST, the one that had called me. After he hung up with me he wrote a 1 star review on my Google business page saying I was rude to his girlfriend?! This is how you all do businss? This is the lowest move I have ever seen a business do to another business! Really?! Do the owners of Signpost really think this is an acceptable approach for your sales people to write bad reviews on innocent businesses that your sales people call?! This is who is representing your company?! If I don't receive a call from the business owner or top management within 24 hours I will report signpost to the BBB. THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS BEHAVIOR!

Below is what this prick wrote on my google as a 1 star review. I bet he doesn't even have a girlfriend!

*
4 months ago
Rude customer service. Not recommended. They verbally insulted my girlfriend and made her cry.

*Personal information redacted by admin

You know, I don't write reviews about too many things, but this one kept nagging at me. My first experience with Signpost was fine. I was contacted by a representative who respectfully asked me to schedule with him at a time that was convenient for me and that initial meeting started off just as expected. The information was very informative, clear, and concise. Once we got to the pricing, I just about fell off my seat! It may be great for some businesses, but I am just not willing to pay that amount of money simply to raise my reviews on google! I respectfully declined the offer and told the rep that I just was not interested and that I was going to utilize other resources to meet my needs. That's where things got sketchy. This guy was just not going to take "no" for an answer. He became manipulative and snarky. It was very clear that he felt I was stupid for walking away. As I usually do with sales people who take things too far, I let it go and felt good about my decision not to do business with those types of values. A few months later, I received another call from the same rep and I regret staying on the phone as long as I did. After respectfully declining again, he asked question after question about what other services I was using, stated how they were inferior to Signpost, and continued to mock me all the way through. By the end, he was obviously frustrated and hung up on me. I have to say that my dealings with Signpost have left me feeling bullied, manipulated, and demeaned. I felt that they completed disregarded and disrespected my obvious "no". I would never recommend doing business with a company that supports such tactics. I am a life coach who teaches boundaries and I such felt that I had to use them to the max with this company!

Signpost cost me a lot of money, and did nothing but COST my business money and piss off my customers. The only positive thing it did give me was a few more google reviews... which I can generate from my client base on my own with just a little effort. It sure wasn't worth the $199/mo to pay for the service.
Signpost messages and deals did NOT increase my business, or help me draw in more customers. One thing that I experienced and found out a fellow Signpost user experienced was robo-calls. As soon as I signed up for Signpost and things went Live, I started getting 2-5 hang-up calls a day from all over the country. (It turns out these were calls auto-generated by their third party phone system to boost my phone numbers for text message offers.) My service area is very small, encompassing only 1 large county in WNC, so calls from all over the country and outside the USA are uncommon. Answering up to 5 hang-up calls a day was a waste of my time and I turned off the feature.
A word of caution: Signpost will PUSH you to use Yelp (which is evil and a huge pain), and will require access to your social media platforms as a manager or administrator. Don't do it! After two weeks with Signpost I tried to sign on and post to my facebook page. They (Signpost) had locked me out of my page as an administrator, so I could no longer post or edit my page. Same thing with my Google Plus.
Their customer service is so "Millenial". Meaning that all access is done on their terms, not the customer's. Once my account was set up I never heard from them again. Most of the time they do not answer the phone, and it takes a week for them to reply. They never answered an email until I started talking about cancelling my service.
Signpost is a subscription based service, but if you don't like the product they still keep you locked in to the subscription. Your early cancellation fee is the total amount owed for the remainder of your subscription. Lame.
Bottom line - Signpost is expensive, the customer service sucks and it did nothing for my business.

With a busy schedule, having a little automation to re-engage my existing clients has helped out A LOT.

Once you get past the pushy sales calls with fast talking reps who are just trying to churn business, the underlying product could actually be very valuable for a company that wants to know what its customers are thinking. The problem is that their "sent at the right time" automated system is one size fits all, and therefore doesn't fit anyone all that well.

The clients you upload through their system will receive generic, un-customizable emails, which may or may not be germane to them. If they do respond, they will immediately be hit be another generic, un-customizable "Tell us more" email that rather than garner you useful information will likely engender no response at all, except for perhaps irritation. Lastly, if they do, out of their own sense of loyalty, decide to write anything useful, they will immediately be hit with another generic, pushy, off-putting request for a review on Yelp etc. The fact that after this gauntlet some users will actually write reviews, leading to the "countable actions" that Signpost touts, is more a testament to great clients than it is to any intelligent marketing and intelligent gathering on the part of Signpost.

To add insult to injury, when you want to discuss your program and campaigns with anyone, you will hear nothing but crickets. Among the sales rep, the on boarding tech rep, and the account manager that you may or may not have spoken to yet, no one seems to be able to pick up the phone or email you back. If they do, no one really knows what the other has done, and can't answer any substantive question. I spent 45 minutes this morning speaking with a not-so-bright account manager who could only essentially shrug and point out that i did in fact receive a couple of reviews..."thats better than most companies."

You will read lots of emails here bashing the sales reps, and the false promises. Take some of those with a grain of salt, as fledgling business owners have unrealistic goals for what they should be able to achieve. If you have existing clients, and are satisfied with some very basic results, this product will probably do ok for you. It will in fact beat your clients up via email and turn up a few responses. But if what you want is a candid assessment of what you are doing well, or not so well, and you want to leverage those positive responses into marketing support? Don't expect that from Signpost. And if you want a company that will work closely with you to tailor their program to your needs, something that would take only a tiny bit of effort by the way, absolutely forget it.

I was randomly called by a sales rep, and I was interested to hear about what they had to offer. I told them TWICE before we started the live demo that I still had a deal with Groupon going and was not interested in marketing any further at this time, but I would keep them in mind for future services. They started off kind of pushy, but went on and seemed nice enough. Let me say, I am a salon manager and have a lot of things to do. They asked for 20 minutes of my time to show me the live demo. It ended up being over 45 minutes which frustrated me, but I remained kind and calm. I also had not looked at my budget to try to include them into it, as I was caught off guard by this call and had no time to prepair. It seemed to me that the majority of what they do and offer is getting you reviews... Anyways, as I said before I was caught off guard and did not look at my business' budget for this. After the demo was done, the sales rep offered me a deal at $133 a month for the standard program. She said the offer would stand until the end of tomorrow. I then told her that I would have to review our budget and see what I can do, as the annual $1600 is a lot to invest in a company I've never heard of and have never done any research on. I get 100 calls a week from telemarketers and advertising companies wanting me to do business with them. I'm not just going to jump into a contract on spot after one phone call without researching and budgeting. After telling the sales rep this, she then got super angry with me and changed the deal she was offering that "stands until the end of tomorrow" of $133 a month back up to $199 a month, over $2000 annually. I was very offended by her reaction of my saying "I'm interested and not trying to waste anyone's time. Let me review things tonight and get back to you for sure tomorrow." I can understand someone getting upset by taking the time to show me the live demo and not making the sale. But her reaction was beyond ridiculous and deeply offended me. She was very rude and insulting at the end of the call. It made me not want to do business with her whatsoever, no matter how badly I may have wanted to get this software! THEY called me, I did not reach out to them! I took time out of my busy schedule to take that call OFF GUARD, and was truly upset and flustered after the call!

Unfortunately, after 4 months we decided to end our relationship with Signpost. They never were able to fully grasp how to answer our calls and made several egregious mistakes. We attempted to rectify the issues multiple times, but ultimately, we had to separate. The companies CEO is a very nice gentlemen and I appreciate their willingness to resolve our issues, but it was the execution that was lacking. I'm giving them a two for effort but make no mistake this was not a good experience and a complete waste of time and money.