(09/07/17) Here is the complete text of an email from Rick Stewart, President at VCG, that was sent to companies that had been accessing a large number of sign company records on Signsearch (www.signsearch.com). The email explained a recent change in Signsearch's data protection algorithms that resulted in our request to have these companies utilize a free SignsearchPRO (www.signsearchpro.com) account.
I’m writing to inform you of an important update to our usage policy for Signsearch (www.signsearch.com) that will affect all of your company’s users as of October 1, 2017.
First and foremost, we’d like to thank you for using Signsearch. We appreciate your support of our services, and hope that we'll be able to continue providing you with access to our rich network of sign companies throughout the US and Canada.
As you may know, in April of this year we launched SignsearchPRO (www.signsearchpro.com), a powerful sign contractor management solution designed to manage your existing sign contractor data so you don’t have to. PRO was developed to provide sign project managers with an effective means of coordinating client, location, and project information with sign contractor data. PRO also serves as a powerful tool to build and manage direct connections with qualified sign contractors throughout the US and Canada. PRO offers far more extensive contractor data then can be found on Signsearch (both in terms of the overall number of companies participating and the information that each provides), and includes, among a host of other features, advanced search filtering options and the aforementioned contractor (aka vendor) management facility where the onus of keeping company profiles up to date shifts to the contractor whose able to do so for all of their connections from a single login, thus benefiting both them and you by ensuring that their information is current. Please understand that PRO is not Signsearch, nor is it a project management solution designed to replace your existing systems.
We sincerely want you to continue to use and benefit from our services, but we want you – need you – to be utilizing the correct service. For companies that are frequently in search of sign contractors (aka “frequent users”) that correct service is now SignsearchPRO, not Signsearch. As a result, those users accessing more than 300 sign company records on Signsearch per year will be blocked from further use of Signsearch by our data protection algorithms. This will be a permanent block. According to our records your company’s users have accessed in excess of 300 profiles this calendar year and thus have already hit that threshold and are now classified as frequent users.
We value legitimate use of our services and we recognize that we need to give you time to consider alternatives, so we’ve set an effective date of October 1, 2017 for the Signsearch block. We’d welcome the opportunity to show you PRO, including offering complimentary data services to setup your PRO account with your existing vendor network and providing team training. We want you to capitalize on all that PRO has to offer, making you and your team better and more efficient than you were before. And remember, there is no cost to use PRO!
Please understand that we value your use of our services, and we want to continue to provide you with the ability to access our rich network, but, at the same time, we need you to understand and accept our approach to a mutually beneficial relationship. If you’re interested in learning more about this relationship, please let us know. We’re here to help you be more profitable by significantly streamlining “what happens in the field” with PRO’s unparalleled approach to managing your own network of sign contractors.
If you have any questions about our new policy, or if you’d like to talk with me directly, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Our goal is to ensure we’ve done everything we can to continue to earn your respect and appreciation for our services.
Kind Regards,
Rick Stewart
Related article: Why are frequent users required to use SignsearchPRO?