Winners and Losers of Data Quality: Nominations

When companies have poor information quality practices, it’s hard to miss. The issues mostly manifest themselves in customer service (CRM) type interactions. As a customer, you may get unwanted or unnecessary contact, too little contact, or you’ll be struck with the feeling that the company doesn’t know you at all during a transaction. It’s more difficult to notice companies with good data quality practices. It’s more a good feeling you get when you do business with them. Good customer service, powered by proper data governance is becoming, more and more, an expected modus operandi.

Starting with this week’s blog entry, I’m going to nominate companies who either exemplify to me the epitome of good data governance with thumbs up, or show signs of data governance inefficiencies with thumbs down.

Thumbs Up: MGM Mirage Resorts and Casinos

I traveled often to Las Vegas in 2007 for industry trade shows, staying at hotels in the MGM system like Mandalay Bay and Monte Carlo, and those outside the MGM system like Caesars Palace. Depending upon who made the reservations for the trip, there were slight variations in my name and/or e-mail address that naturally occur.

Still, I am quite satisfied with the apparent knowledge that MGM has about me. They seem to understand that, as I am not exactly a high roller, discounted rooms and free buffets are appropriate offers for me. I don’t get duplicate e-mails and direct mail pieces from them, even though there was ample opportunity for those types of things to happen this year. The marketing materials that I get from them seem like a service, not at all a bother.

Nicely done, MGM. I’ll be back to bet the daily double at Monmouth some time soon.

Thumbs Down: Hewlett-Packard

Conversely, from my perspective, HP seems to have a data governance problem. Every quarter or so, HP sends me a catalog, listing home office store products. But every catalog comes in duplicate. Sometimes two, sometimes more. This time, one of the catalogs says that I'm "Steve Sarsfield" and the other calls me "Steven Sarsfield". For some reason, the one addressed to Steven also has a line that identifies the street that intersects my address. Not sure why, since that doesn't have anything to do with my official postal address.

So, I'm going to throw some numbers at you HP. Let's say conservatively, you send out 500,000 catalogs each quarter. Let's estimate that 20% of your database contains duplicates - a fairly conservative number. Finally, I'm going to estimate the catalog postage and printing costs at $1 ea.

That would be 20% of 500,000 = 100,000 catalogs that you send unnecessarily. At $1 each, that's $100,000 per mailing wasted. You mail it every quarter? 4 x $100,000 = $400,000 per year.

I know margins on computer hardware are very slim these days. How many computers do you have to sell to add $400k directly to the bottom line? In this one division in this very large company, there seems to be inefficiencies.

Besides that, it’s mildly irksome to receive duplicate catalogs – just more paper that I have to make sure goes into the recycle bin and not into a landfill.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been very, very happy with my HP printer and PC. Heed this, HP. Despite making some of the best products in the world, I believe that poor data governance is stealing away your goodwill.