'IQ Trainwrecks and Customer Service' Category
The Butterfly Effect
I’m sure most of you are familiar with the concept of the “Butterfly Effect“, that part of Chaos theory that tells us that the small disturbances of the air by a butterfly’s wings in Cleveland can cause a natural disaster on the far side of the world.
A popular myth is that the term ‘bug’ as […]An electric (bill) shock
Courtesy of Cambridge News comes this story of a shocking electricity bill.
British Electricity provider N-Power sent a Cambridge woman a bill recently for just over stg£90million (US$ 177million). This was bemusing to her because she has availed of a pre-paid electricity meter. It would seem that for the woman to have run up such a bill would have […]British Gas Billing leaves explosive whiff in the air….
The Register today reports that British Gas (aka Centrica) is taking legal action against international consulting firm Accenture after a total overhaul of their billing systems costing stg£300m resulted in customers being incorrectly billed (in some instances on multiple accounts - for one customer at the same address). British Gas claims that it has had […]
A salutory tale of poor IQ
Gizmodo.com occasionally features ‘localisation’ problems (they spell it with a ‘z’, yet another localisation problem). As localisation raises challenges of customer expectation, information design, information presentation and a whole heap of other potential tripwires for Information Quality disasters, this is sometimes a good source of quick examples of how poor quality information can screw up […]
Aer Lingus pricing blunder brings everyone back down to earth (and now the lawyers are involved!)
The IAIDQ is holding its annual US conference (the IDQ Conference) in San Antonio this September. As a Director of the Association and a potential speaker at the event I’ve been researching my options for flying to the US as cheaply (but comfortably) as possible.
Imagine my dismay when I spotted that I’d missed an opportunity […]Dream host, Billing Nightmare
Courtesy (yet again) of The Register comes this case of poor Information Quality. It seems that US web hosting company DreamHost accidentally overbilled its customers for services due to what has been described as a “fat finger error”.
Full details of the good intentions that paved the path to this Information Quality Hell can be found […]oops Amazon did it again…
Also from “The Register”, it appears that Amazon have again created ‘interesting’ relationships in their data that have had uncomfortable results for their customers.
We previously reported on the IQ trainwreck that occured when Amazon sent email recommendations for sex toys to people who’d never bought such items from Amazon. Today they seem to have gone […]Hidden data, hidden dangers
I have always been an advocate of speaking of “data” rather than of “databases”, and have always felt that hiding data within large integrated database systems is a danger not only to the quality of the data but to the owners of the data themselves: the customers.
A couple of recent events illustrate this very well.
My […]
