‘Tis the Season for Data Quality
Jim Harris
‘Tis the season for getting holiday greeting cards, and not only from family and friends, since many companies also like to mail seasons greetings to their customers, employees, and business partners.
I do appreciate the sentiment, but I mostly just check the envelopes for data quality issues with the name and/or postal address.
I have never made it through an entire holiday season without receiving at least one incorrectly addressed greeting card, and this year was no exception. In the above image, I have highlighted that I apparently live in the town of Ankely, Pennsylvania.
I actually live in the town of Ankeny, Iowa.
The United States postal abbreviations for Pennsylvania and Iowa are PA and IA, respectively. Additionally, the town name is only off by one character (L instead of N in the fifth position of a six character string). Therefore, the data matching algorithms provided by most data quality tools would consider these relatively minor discrepancies to be highly probable matches.
And although Pennsylvania and Iowa are approximately 900 miles away from each other, since my street address and ZIP code (both intentionally blurred out in the image) were correct, the post office was able to successfully deliver the greeting card to me.
However, the really funny thing is that this greeting card was sent to me by a . . . (wait for it) . . . data quality tool vendor!
So apparently ‘tis the season for data quality . . . data quality issues, that is :-)
‘Tis the Season for Sharing Data Quality Stories
Have you encountered any seasonal data quality issues? If so, please share your story by posting a comment below.
Reader Comments (5)
I don't have a seasonal story to share, but I did recently get a gift certificate from a restaurant my parents like. (My mom likes to add me to mailing lists. Sigh.)
Somehow, the envelope made it to me despite:
* Wrong name - addressed to the mysterious "Crystal" who gets a lot of mail at my house
* No street number - My street is several blocks long, and there was no house number on the mailing label
* Wrong ZIP code
Impressive. I wonder if the mailman was angling for a tip for his detective work.
Like Santa, we should be making our list and checking it twice. (We should be sorting on the 'nice' Boolean, too.)
There will be a day when we all get with the times and send each other festive holiday tweets. Why not now? ;)
Great post as always!
I also hardly get postmail with my info properly written: there is either a mistake with my first name (Céline instead of Cécile), my last name or the name of my street (a Russian city that sounds like German ... in France!).
The good thing about it is : when I receive unsolicited mail from a third party, I can easily recognize the point of origin!
So little spammers and advertising gurus, you should use a good data quality tool and clean your databases! :)
Thanks for your comments, Crystal, Santa, and Céline . . . er, I mean Crysta, Steve, and Cécile :-)
Not a data quality story per se, but seasonal. I few years back, I got a Christmas card from a fellow consultant who was specializing in CRM. The problem was the card was too big and I had to pay $.24 postage due (as did many others I'm sure).