I got an email into my work inbox today enticing me to attend a Gartner CRM summit in London at which Don Peppers (he of Peppers & Rogers, 1-to-1 marketing fame etc.) would be keynoting.

I won’t be going.

The email was sent to my email address from a site that espouses CRM best practices.

The email salutation was “Dear Test”. Click on the image below to see the full screenshot.

Yes, it is easy to make mistakes with direct mail and direct email (the IAIDQ has had its moments in the past, but we work hard to understand root causes and prevent errors). However, where information is missing from a profile a valid ‘default’ should be selected (“Dear CRM Practitioner” or something”) . Referring to your customers as “tests” means you’ve failed a test yourself.

As an aside, a substantial root cause of the 70%+ failure rate of CRM implementations has been a failure to tackle the issues of poor quality information.

Of course, this isn’t the only email I’ve received recently where an Information Quality issue makes me discount the value of the email. Gartner continually send emails to my work account addressed to Ms. Daragh O’Brien. This is not correct.

Of course, when I click on the link in the email to update my profile with Gartner, I should be able to change this and fix what appears to be an error caused by some data cleansing tool. Unfortunately not, I can only change my marketing suppressions.

Another organisation in the UK continually changes the address they have for me to an address in a building the company I work for isn’t based in anymore and which I never worked in or gave as a contact address. This is obviously master data they’ve bought from somewhere but try as I might they don’t seem able to correct it.

Errors will creep into processes and into data. The best approach is to make sure you don’t have a process that creates poor quality information (inserting “Test” in the salutation rather than a name) or that you provide opportunities for people to correct your information (such as correcting name prefixes that are wrong).