Over at SmartDataCollective, Daniel Gent has shared an excellent example of a very common scenario in organizations across the globe… the troubling matter of the duplicated, fragmented and inconsistent customer details.
He shares a story with his readers about a recent trip to a retail store which used his telephone number as the search string to find his customer profile. The search returned no fewer than 7 distinct customer records, all of them variations on a theme. Daniel enumerates the records thusly:
1) One past owner of the phone from over 15 years ago;
2) Three versions of my name;
3) Two versions of my wife’s name; and,
4) One record that was a joint name account.
The implications that Daniel identifies for this are direct and immediate costs to the business:
- Multiple duplicate direct mailings per year offering services
- Multiple call centre contacts offering yet more services
- Potential problems with calling on his warranty for the goods he bought because the store can’t find which of his customer records the warranty details are associated to.
Of course, this is just the tip of the ice-berg.
- Duplicate personal data raises a data protection/data privacy risk (for more on that, check out the IAIDQ’s recent webinar on Data Protection and Information Quality)
- Failure to manage customer data correctly can lead to you being sued (for more on this point, check out this article on the IAIDQ website and this article as well, which looks at the implications of a recent UK court case [member only content])
Daniel’s experience is all too common. And it is a Retail Data Nightmare that can quickly turn into an Information Quality trainwreck if left unchecked.