Data quality, Customer Data Integration, and the Hippocratic Oath

A few months after my dad died back in 1984 my mother received a letter from our bank addressed to “Dr. T.B. Joyce (deceased)”. Needless to say my mum was a little distraught.

In a similar case I learned recently that the sales people of a local company were putting the gender of the person in parenthesis after the person’s androgynous first name. Imagine getting a personalized email from that company:
Dear Terri (female), or Dear Pat (male)

In a post back in March I discussed the many ways that data goes bad. Excluding the slow natural decay of data (actually it has sped up in the recession), sales people are responsible for much of the bad data. In the past Marketing has also shared the blame but the marketing automation systems now have the ability to validate incoming data, do format checking, and generally minimize the likelihood that marketing is adding bad data to the CRM. To wit, it is time that Marketers took the Hippocratic Oath to vow to do no harm to the Customer Relationship Management database!

The Hippocratic Oath for Marketers
I SWEAR in the presence of the CRM Administrators and before my marketing peers that according to my ability and judgment I will keep this Oath and Stipulation.

I WILL CONTINUE with diligence to keep abreast of advances in marketing. I will import only valid, well formed data, with all required fields, into the marketing automation system, so long as the treatment of other data is not compromised thereby, and I will seek the counsel of particularly skilled IT dudes where indicated for the benefit of the database.

I WILL FOLLOW that method of data treatment which according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of the database and abstain from whatever is harmful or mischievous. I will neither prescribe nor administer a lethal dose of dubious updates to any database even if asked by my VP.

WITH PURITY, HOLINESS AND BENEFICENCE I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent CANSPAM violation, I will neither wholesale overwrite CRM data nor carry out any new field experiments on the database without the valid informed consent of the CRM administrator or the appropriate Sales Ops designee thereof, understanding that field insertion must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of the database. Into whatever database setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the data and will abstain from every voluntary act of data corruption and further from the addition of duplicates.

WHATEVER I MAY SEE in connection with Marketing driven CRM data changes which ought not be spoken abroad, I will immediately divulge, reckoning that all such should not be kept secret from Sales Operations.

WHILE I CONTINUE to keep this Oath unviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of marketing with the blessing of the CRM administrators and respected by my peers and society, but should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse by my lot.

My dad would be proud!  Got your own data horror story, send it my way!
-Kevin

Comments

[Susan Linman]

Great Oath!
We have a story to add, Kevin.
One of our client's sales organization had a practice of using the title field for notes. Before the client could send any mailings to their database, each title field was reviewed and notes eliminated. It would have been extremely embarrassing to address the following "valued prospects and customers" with titles such as:
Bill Jones, is a jerk
Mary Smith, has no budget
Frank Johnson, is not a decision maker
Tom Franklin, reports to Bill Jones
Alan Williams, not worth a call
Now, we always check databases for fields that could have notes a company would not want to send to directly to their prospects and customers.