Does No One Remember GIGO?

The other day we got this nice hand-written note from the Customer Experience Director of the pharmacy at our local grocery store since we’re new to the store.

Except, not quite.

It’s not to us, but to Graham, the toddler.

It’s not our local grocery store.

And we’re not new, and will hopefully never go there again.

See, last year we needed a prescription for Graham, our actual local grocery store didn’t have it, but offered that instead of making us wait we could drive to this other store 20 minutes away, pick it up there. We did, no problem.

Systems Should Be For Humans

Well, the other week, we did a refill of that same med, phoning it into our normal store. Go to pick it up and they are baffled. Eventually realize that it is at the other store.

Why? Well because their system is stupidly inhuman. It keeps last-used data for the often good reason that we shouldn’t have to make the same selections we always do. My name and date of birth and so forth almost never change.

But they never graded information about a prescription as one-time or recurring. So, where it was filled is not one-time, exceptional data but permanently part of the record. Refilling years later still insists it goes to the other store. So we drive over there.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

I learned very, very basic — in fact, BASIC — computing in the 1970s. We started off planning programs on mimeographed paper forms, for example. We were taught lots of things that seemed hugely trite, obvious, and maybe even silly at the time.

One was GIGO. If you put bad data into the system, you are guaranteed bad results. That meant a lot of things. Not just check your work, but validate input, think about what you are asking the system or user to enter, as maybe it’s ambiguous or confusing, etc. etc.

Well, we seem to have entirely forgotten that. From bad surveys to things like this. Where the staff — the manager of the pharmacy was one of the people helping us that night — knows perfectly well that we’re not new customers, not going to be regular customers, and are pretty annoyed about the whole thing.

No amount of clever CRM can get you out of that, no amount of being nice in the greeting card will make me happy about the reason I went there.

Design your systems better, to avoid capturing stupid data. And monitor what your system says to do lest to send happy greetings to people who are not happy or new, send acceptance letters to every applicant of your hard-to-get-into school, confuse one patient with another, or a thousand other stupid, rude, and downright dangerous mistakes that could be corrected easily if anyone cared, or was empowered to use their own judgement.