Category Archives: Retail IQ Trainwrecks

The perils of perpetuating errors

Courtesy of Dataqualitypro.com on twitter comes this story about how Virgin Media in the UK have sent a letter to a customer prospect addressing them as “Mr Illegal Immigrant”.

Virgin Media have investigated the issue and state that it was an isolated incident arising from data purchased from a 3rd party. This suggests that Virgin Media might have issues with the quality control processes they apply to vetting data purchased from 3rd parties.

From an IQ Trainwrecks perspective, this ticks a lot of boxes as it has resulted in embarrassment for Virgin Media and hassle and trouble for the actual householder, a Mr Needham who told the Daily Telegraph that:

… he was offended by the letter: ”I was a bit shocked. I was taken aback. I have tried to ring up and complain and they have not really done anything about it.

”They kept passing me from pillar to post. They tried to say it was not their fault, it was somebody else. It is not good.” Continue reading

Information Quality – Every Little Helps

[Thanks to Tony O’Brien for sending this one in to us recently. For those of you not familiar with Tesco and their marketing slogans, this is their corporate website.]

ManagementToday.com has a great story (from 25th November) of how six bicycles purchased by Tesco from a supplier came with an apparent£1million (US$1.62 million) price tag.

Some red faces at Tesco HQ this morning, after news emerged that Britain’s biggest supermarket accidentally paid one of its suppliers almost £1m for six bikes.

The unit cost for each bicycle turns out to be a whopping £164000 instead of the usual £164.

While the majority of the money was repaid, the trouble for Tesco is that they are engaged in a dispute with the supplier in relation to other matters so the supplier has held on to 12% of the money. So Tesco have called in their lawyers. Which means that the total cost of failure will inevitably be much higher by the time the whole mess is sorted out.

Of course, simple consistency checks on data entry could have trapped that error and saved Tesco money and embarrassment.

It seems that with Information Quality, as with Retail Grocery, every little helps.