When an assistant gets you wrong: correcting what you do not control

There is an unpleasant and increasingly common moment: a customer tells you they asked an assistant what you do, and repeats back an answer that is not yours. A price that no longer exists, abandoned opening hours, a service you do not provide, or a sentence belonging to a competitor.

The instinct is to correct the answer, and that is the one impossible action. There is no form, no counterpart to write to, no correction window. What does exist are the sources the answer was built from — and there the work is real, part of it on your side and part elsewhere.

This article describes that work: the four ways of being cited wrongly, where the information actually comes from, in what order to correct it, and what to give up trying to obtain. It is written for somebody who has already seen the problem. The companion article covers the earlier question — how to be cited at all — and none of it is repeated here.

It carries no chart, and the first section explains why the number you would want here cannot exist, for a reason different from every one our other articles give.

The errors that concern you fall into four families, and they are not corrected in the same place. Telling them apart before acting avoids spending a week on the wrong source.

The first is the expired fact: opening hours, a price, an address, a service that existed and no longer does. It is the most frequent and the easiest, because the source is nearly always a page of yours or a listing you control.

The second is the fact that was never true: information nobody at your end ever published. It comes from elsewhere — a directory that guessed, a page confusing you with a business of a similar name, an old article misread.

The third is attribution: a sentence, an offer or a figure belonging to a competitor and lent to you, or the reverse. The fourth is the omission that becomes an assertion — the assistant finds no trace of a service and answers that you do not provide it, which is a far more damaging sentence than silence.

The most stubborn case is not wrong information but contradictory information: two sources say different things about you, both plausible, and the assistant chooses — often the older one, because it is repeated in more places.

The frequent contradictions are ordinary and expensive. Two phone numbers, one of them old and still ringing. Two addresses, because you moved and a directory did not follow. Two company names, the trading name and the registered one, only one of which appears on your site.

These are not settled by adding the correct information but by removing the wrong one, which is much less pleasant and much more effective. Publishing your current number while an old one stays online elsewhere solves nothing — you have created a third source in an argument between two.

The general rule is worth keeping beyond this subject: on everything checkable — name, address, phone, hours — the objective is not to be present everywhere but to be identical everywhere. A dull consistency beats a rich and discordant presence.

When an error is confirmed there is an order that saves a great deal of time, because it runs from the most controllable to the least and because the first steps often suffice.

Your own site first: the page concerned, and above all the wording. Correct information drowned in a long sentence is quoted less than a short, assertive one. It is the only point where this article meets its neighbour, and it does not press further.

Then the listings you control without having written recently: the business listing, trade directories, platform profiles. That is where the majority of expired facts live, and nobody ever reopens them, because they were filled in once at registration.

Finally third parties, which take diplomacy rather than technique: a message to whoever published the page, polite, precise, with the correction ready to paste. The response rate is better than expected when the request is short and the correction supplied. What fails is asking for removal; what works is asking for an update.

Our share is the investigation and the correction: identifying which source feeds a specific error, making name, address, phone and hours consistent everywhere they appear, replacing withdrawn pages with pages saying they are withdrawn, and writing to third parties with the correction ready. It is patient and unspectacular work.

We refuse to promise a delay. The chain between your correction and an answer that stops containing the error holds no link we can see, and a supplier announcing within thirty days is inventing a number they control no part of. What we can state is what we corrected and when.

We also refuse to sell monthly monitoring on this subject. The useful frequency is quarterly, for the reason in section seven, and a monthly report would mainly produce random variation presented as trends — which is a service paid for manufacturing noise.

Finally, the first step needs nothing and you can do it today: ask an assistant three questions about your own business, note the answers and the date, and click the sources it indicates. In half an hour you will know whether you have a problem and which one — and that is the information deciding everything else.