One mantra of the nutrition
industry is “you are what you
eat.”
That statement is
just
as
true of statistical analytics
and market research as it is of
people. By that standard, many
companies and their databases
aren’t on healthy diets.
Those in the research community
who
work
on
customer
satisfaction
or
Voice-of-theCustomer (VoC) studies see
this on a weekly basis.
We
get a file from the client with
their customers and customer
contacts and discover that some
proportion of the records is
simply wrong.
Most studies these days are
conducted online, and result in
massive numbers of unanswered
email invitations.
Since many
mail servers will not return
error messages, the lack of any
response is uninformative.
Is the customer disaffected?
Is a spam filter blocking
the invitations?
Or does
the
email
address
no
longer exist? The lack of
a response says nothing
about
what’s
really
happening.