Gotcha Gang Strike on Data Lapse

Kamloops, BC Monday, March 24, 2008

It was a warm day and the sun was high overhead as the members of the Gotcha Gang rode down the side of Amber Mountain on their way to Gooby’s Gulch, the site of their latest heist. With their recent world voyage behind them, it was time to get back to work, guarding their turf and capitalizing on the innocent mistakes of uninformed mailers.

Their target was one Mr. Bill Gooby, a self-made entrepreneur who took pride in his customer database. This was an especially important target for the gang, since the attentive Mr. Gooby had managed to elude them many times before. This time though, the gang laid a sneaky trap that nearly cost Mr. Gooby a small fortune.

Much of Mr. Gooby’s success could be attributed to his remarkable database. He had analyzed his customer profiling requirements and could easily segment his data by customer or prospect, product interests, whether they were using competitors’ products, participation in loyalty programs and he maintained a complete touchpoint history. His database was designed to help in the retention and cross selling within his current customer base as well as the mining and acquisition of valuable new clients. It was state of the art and it worked well for him.

It was also very clean. Mr. Gooby had ensured that every address was formatted according to Canada Post standards. So, when his service provider ran his 100,000 record file through certified Canada Post Address Correction and Validation software, it achieved an astonishing 99.1% accuracy. After this processing, his service provider returned his nearly-perfect data to him in spreadsheet format, along with a comprehensive file layout and his statement of address accuracy.

Scanning the data, Bill noted that, although there was a city and a postal code, one of the records did not have a street address. He surmised that this was why he had not achieved 100% accuracy and set out to see if there were other such records on his file. Bill selected the street column and did a quick sort, floating all blank street addresses to the top of his spreadsheet. After a little bit of work, he determined that he could not fix the records without street addresses and deleted them from his file. This left only records with “complete” name and address information.

A few weeks later, Mr. Gooby and his marketing team decided to send out few small mailings in order to test a promotional postcard they had be working on. They used the database to create eight blocks of 750 addresses and mailed a total of 6,000 cards at Lettermail rates. Then they just sat back and prepared to analyze the responses.

That response, however, was not at all what they had been expecting. Within day, all of the postcards were returned as undeliverable. Flustered, he called his service provider, who was able to determine that the street addresses had been scrambled. It was Inspector Hamish McMoney, however, who was able to trace the problem back to Mr. Gooby’s spreadsheet manipulation.

“It’s a simple mistake,” the inspector said, “especially with spreadsheet-based data sheets. Basically, Mr. Gooby sorted the street field alphabetically, but left the other fields untouched. As a result, none of the records retained the proper street information and all the addresses became undeliverable.”

As it turns out, Mr. Gooby had a backup file that was only several months old, and was able to recover most of his data. Still, he had lost $3,120 in wasted postage, not to mention the cost of printing the cards (they could not be reused) and the time he spent rebuilding all the data he had gathered over the past several months. All told, the exact losses will probably never be calculated, but the fact remains that Mr. Gooby was extremely lucky. His test mailings were part of a preparation for a larger mailing, which was slated to use the entire database. Inspector McMoney estimates that Mr. Gooby and his associates would have dropped an alarming $60,000 in wasted print, preparation and postage if they had gone ahead with the larger mailing!

As for the Gotcha Gang, sources indicate that although they have certainly scored much larger takes in the past, they were just pleased to have been able to hit Mr. Gooby at all.

“It just goes to show that everyone is vulnerable,” Inspector McMoney said. “All it takes to get stung is one simple mistake. Hopefully, though, we can all learn from Mr. Gooby’s circumstances, and become more aware of what we’re doing with our data.”

Please note that the Gotcha Gang is not Canada Post. The Gotcha Gang represents the effect of decisions that result in paying excess postage, labour costs or minimizing opportunity. Most of these releases are based on actual events, though dates and locations may be fictitious.