A few months ago I blogged about trying Dun & Bradstreet’s credit building service for my small business, Cedarcrest Capital, as an experiment.

Now, three months later, my score for them: Low.

In at least three different ways they’ve failed to live up to their promise and made it impossible to recommend the service to other small business owners. First, they failed to deliver on their original promise; next, they tried a fear tactic to generate additional business; and finally, they did not follow up to satisfy a customer who expressed dissatisfaction (that would be me).

A steep price-tag – close to $600 – supposedly pays for D&B to contact your company’s creditors with a view to verifying a history of timely debt payment. I provided the maximum allowed six creditors to D&B, with up-to-date contact information.

After a month, a D&B representative reported to me their inability to reach even three of my creditors, despite the fact that I know I could reach each of them with one phone call.

Having failed to deliver on the basic promise of the service, the D&B representative proceeded to try to sell me further, more expensive, services relating to monitoring my business credit.

When I pushed back over the phone and said D&B needed do a passable job with the original task before moving on to further sales, the representative attempted to sell through fear. He suggested that my lack of D&B Score will hurt my borrowing ability, and further that I’ll need to pay them additional sums to monitor my business credit going forward.

Now, I’m not a good candidate for the “fear sell” since my business has perfect credit; maybe this will work with less credit-worthy businesses. But I have to think almost no business owner would purchase more products from a company that couldn’t do their first job correctly.

When I politely suggested as much, the D&B representative decided that arguing with me was a better tactic than promising to follow up internally and make it right.

It seems he chose wrongly.