Why we fired our PR agency

Yesterday, we had the unpleasant task of firing our Public Relations agency, Buzz PR. We fired them because they were spamming our customers. At Cleartrip, we do not spam our customers or anyone else, ever. Period. There is no negotiating this.

Here’s what happened.

At around 4 pm, we came across this Tweet from @jackerhack:

@cleartrip Got mailed by Perfect Relations again. This is really a Hotel California situation now. /cc: @surdattack @gonsalves_r

— Kiran Jonnalagadda (@jackerhack) December 4, 2012

We had provided @jackerhack’s email to Buzz PR a few months ago when we launched an update to our mobile site. As part of the launch, we had invited a few select bloggers and customers to our offices to give them a sneak preview of the product before it launched. Buzz PR coordinated these invites for us, that’s why we gave them the email addresses of these bloggers and customers.

Buzz PR then proceeded to amalgamate the email addresses of our contacts and customers into their own email announcements list. These people, who trusted us, soon started receiving all kinds of emails from Buzz PR that had nothing to do with Cleartrip.

Prior to yesterday, @jackerhack had pointed out to us on two separate occasions that he was being spammed by Buzz PR. On each of those occasions we had strong words with Buzz PR and asked them to ensure this never happened again. Yesterday, it happened again.

There was no point in having another conversation with Buzz PR asking them to stop this. Around 7 pm, we sent them a brief email firing them. Three strikes.

We’re drawing a line in the sand here — we do not and will not spam our customers. Ever. And we certainly will not tolerate any of our partners spamming them. We’re only sorry we gave them three strikes, we should have fired them sooner.

And to everyone else that ever received spammy emails from Buzz PR because we shared your email address with them, we’re deeply sorry. None of our future partners will ever make this mistake again.