Peerside

I rarely mention my day job in my blog because mostly I blog about alternative topics to give my brain a break - isn't there a saying "a change is as good as a rest" ? However today is different, I quite innocently stumbled across a classic data quality issue in real life - and all because I bought an iPod and wanted it delivered to my brother in Waterford.

The Apple Store is great, allows you to select what you want, select the color and even engrave a message on the back. No complaints there. So finally, time to enter the destination address, no surprises there and I provided a perfectly correct Name, Townland, Parish Name, County address and off it goes. Apple prompt send me my confirmation and the next day I get my order reference and UPS tracking code.

So far so good - I'm one happy customer, this is how the web should work - and my brother is waiting for UPS to arrive. But it doesn't.

Checking the UPS system it looks like the order has been postponed for a day and then two days later he gets a call from the UPS courier looking for directions to his house. Ok, late but better than not arriving at all, right ?

Then the courier asked where the house was in Wexford !!!

Brother: "We're in Waterford"

Courier: "Ah, well it'll be tomorrow then, we thought it was in Wexford".

Surprised we checked out the original order - I have been known to make mistakes - but  the correct address is clearly there. Then we checked the UPS delivery only to find that the address had been truncated to "<Parish Name>, Ireland".

So it looks like somewhere between the Apple Store and UPS the address got munged and data quality suffered resulting in a tarnished customer experience and wasted effort by the courier - both of which cost cash to companies who care about such things.

Ok, anyone with any common sense spots the problem here but you would be amazed how often this happens and how much errors like this cost companies who are often unaware that the problems even exist until after the fact. Any half respecting data quality process would have caught that a) the address was incomplete and b) an address validation would have caught that the parish was most likely not in Wexford and if those test results were monitored UPS would very quickly spot the scale of the issue and even calculate how much it costs and a matching ROI in fixing the problem. But enough, it's after work hours .. back to xkcd.

Now here's hoping the package turns up tomorrow ....