Really? I run a company called Bawnmare Enterprises?

I did a search for this company and it doesn’t exist. What does exist, however, is a company called Bawnmore Enterprises, a direct sales firm operating in Galway, Longford and Westmeath. I’m guessing these are the guys who called to my door to get me to sign up to Airtricity in the first place…

In other words… your house is named after you now.

This would cause no end of problems in downstream processes such as customer matching, fraud profiling, credit risk profiling (i.e. where they might try to match data from Experian against the customer database to spot potential dodgy geezers).

My old team spotted a lot of this when profiling the data ahead of a planned data migration a few years back (the project didn’t run in the end). I wonder if the teams working on future data migrations will take the time to understand this lovely behavioural quirk or will they just suck and dump data from “Building Name” field in system A to “Building Name” field in System B (my money, unfortunately, is on the latter).

Of course, in your specific case the real problem is the bill generation process which obviously can’t process extended character set characters like ampersands. Or accented characters. Imagine if your name was Pól & Helen Beggs. The middle of your name would be mangled as well.

But, what would I know about these things.

At least eircom haven’t surgically removed your nuts like Vodafone have done to me.

The key root cause of your problem there is a failure to ensure continued investment and maintenance in the processes that take account data and turn it into customer gold, and further into how that information is then extracted and presented to customers via bills and marketing data. The bill data was managed by the Billing section. Nothing to do with me.

Suffice it to say that I was the evangelist and advocate of proper management of customer data overall and they had no qualms about approving my application for redundancy (and I’m now preculded from doing work there for a while as a contractor). I have tales a plenty that I can’t tell yet. Problems like yours were not unique. But apparently they are buying a whole heap of new software that will make everything OK, because that has worked well in the past.

The fact that they made you a business customer is interesting. Has your account type been changed to a Business as well? That screws up their segmentation models….. Somebody obviously thought that that would fix the problem.

…. must take purple pill now as I am having flashbacks.

When I set up my eircom account seven years ago, I requested that the account would be set up in both my name and my wife’s name. I was assured at the time that this was not a problem, but you already have great experience of how well they f%@* things up there. My name now appears on my bill as:

MR PAUL HELEN &BEGG

It’s interesting how “Beggs” became “&BEGG”. I later asked them to correct this (stop laughing). The name stayed the same, but I now apparently either work for a company or live at a house entitled “PAUL&HELEN BEGGS”

At least they got the information in there somewhere.

You are right – when they decide to to a CRM integration of your Customer entity they will have lot of fun(?) trying to figure out if all 3 are the same person.