When is Baltimore, MD = Hamilton, NJ?
Recently I received this email from a friend.
Stef,
Thought you’d get a kick out of my experience over the weekend. It seems to illustrate a novel sort of data quality problem. I was visiting my friends who live in Baltimore, and managed to lock my keys in the car. So I called the locksmith I found in the yellow pages, and handed my cellphone to my friend to describe where the locksmith should go. He said, “We’re in Hamilton, on Twin Oak, just a couple of blocks south of Hamilton Ave.” This seemed to satisfy the operator, and I was promised a locksmith within the hour.
50 minutes later I get a call on my cellphone. It was the locksmith, “Hey, I’m trying to find Twin Oak, and not having any luck.” I put my phone on speaker, and explained the situation to my friend. He said, “We’re between Harford and Walther.”
The locksmith paused for a moment. ”I don’t know either of those streets.”
My friend shot me a look like the locksmith was crazy. ”What do you mean? Those are two major streets in Baltimore.”
“Baltimore? I’m in Hamilton, NJ.”
“NJ? How did that happen?”
“Oh, jeez. Sorry about that. A couple of months ago we started using a regional call center that’s located in central Jersey. Don’t worry, this happens all the time. First time I’ve gotten a call for Baltimore, but I get calls for Indiana all the time. I’ll call back the dispatcher, and I’m sure they’ll get someone out to you soon.”
Sure enough, about half an hour later a locksmith showed up and opened up my car. But I guess when the operator saw that my cellphone had a 609 area code, and heard Hamilton, she just assumed it was NJ. Of course, we were calling into a local Baltimore number. We just assumed they’d know we were in Baltimore. It just shows how things can get messed up these days.
Cheers,
Michael
My friend is right, I do find it fascinating. The consolidation of customer service centers carries the potential of lower cost and better availability, but also eliminates local knowledge and local context that used to minimize errors before they occurred. It’s just one more reason why companies need to be more vigilant than ever about data quality, and need to provide front line personnel with tools to keep it under control.
Posted in It Happened | 2 Comments »
Nice post, let’s pray our ambulance services don’t go too far down the same path!
Had a similar thing happen with the cable company. Since I live in one town, but have a telephone exchange number (first three digits after the area code) from the next town over, it was nearly impossible to reach the right customer service center when calling from my home number. It usually took a few transfers to get to the right place. Good intentions with poor results.