Informatica Data Quality

Marshall Field, the American department-store owner and retail merchandizing pioneer, is usually credited with coming up with the now much abused adage “Right or wrong, the customer is always right”. These days the saying is usually shortened to the more functional “the customer is always right”. But with self-service data entry, where more and more customers are responsible for supplying their own contact and order details via web applications, it is worth revisiting the entire quote.

The fact is even when the customer is responsible for “bad data” the vendor still has to shoulder the blame and do something about it.

Take the example of a friend of mine who recently signed up with a well known social networking website. Let’s ignore the reasons why he signed up – he’s not entirely sure – or what social networking sites are for – none of us is entirely sure yet, but I guess we’ll start to get the point as more and more of them are sold to industry giants for n billion dollars.

My friend (let’s call him Paul) definitely signed up once, probably twice and possibly three times – so now we have a classic data quality problem, duplicate customer entries. When I find one of Paul’s entries on the site, I send him a message to say hello – after all even though I have his phone number and could just call him, this is the new era of Internet social networking and I don’t want to be left out. He gets an email to tell him he has a message and logs on to one of his multiple personalities to see who it’s from. But because the account he logs on to is not the one I found he doesn’t see my message. He leaves feeling disappointed and under whelmed by the whole social networking experience. At the same time because I don’t get a reply to my cheery greeting I feel neglected and don’t invite Paul and his wife to dinner the following weekend!

Luckily because we live in a small enough town, we bump into each other in a real life social situation (i.e. the local pub), make up and all live happily ever after.

Despite the happy ending, there is a lesson here that our old friend Marshall Field would not miss, and that is despite the fact Paul is a smart guy who knows that ultimately he messed up a bit with his data entry procedures, he still blames the social networking site to some degree for letting it happen.

This was just something Paul was trying out in his spare time (not on work time I promise boss). But the same sort of scenario happens more and more as people are faced with self-service Internet applications for banking, paying bills, handling their telephone accounts and much more. The problem for the bank, insurance company, government agency or utility company is that their customers will still expect them to get their data right, even when it’s the customer who made the mistake in the first place.

In fact having stringent automated data quality processes and procedures in place at the point of entry becomes even more important in the self-service age. Most organizations will know that even when they have say a couple of hundred trained call center staff handling front line data entry, they still end up with multiple data quality problems. What is it going to be like when thousands of customers, none of them trained for the job, take over the task?

Not to worry all you have to remember is, right or wrong the customer is always right!