As a data quality professional it is a learning experience when you are the user.
During the last years I have worked for a data quality tool vendor with headquarter in Germany. As part of the role of serving partners, prospects and customers in Scandinavia I have been a CRM system user. As a tool vendor own medicine has been taken which includes intelligent real time duplicate check, postal address correction, fuzzy search and other goodies built into the CRM system.
Sounds perfect? Sure, if it wasn’t for a few diversity glitches.
The address doesn’t exist
Postal correction is only activated for Germany. This actually makes some sense since most activity is in Germany and postal correction is not that important in Scandinavia as company (and citizen) information is more available and then usually a better choice. Due to a less fortunate setup during the first years my routine when inserting a new account was to pick correct data from a business directory, paste into the CRM system and then angry override the warning that the address doesn’t exist (in Germany).
Dear worshipful Mr Doctor Oetker
In Germany salutation is paramount. In Scandinavia it is not common to use a prefixed salutation anymore – and if you do, you are regarded as very old fashioned. So having the salutation field for a contact as mandatory is an annoyance and setting up an automated salutation generation mechanism is a complete waste of time.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 