Who are those customers?

Who are your customers? If your organization is like most, that question may be hard to answer. I’ve worked at companies with fewer than 200 customers who had trouble coming up with a list of who they were, what products they used, and who the main contacts for each company were. And I’ve worked for companies with tens of thousands of customers with the very same problem. 

Inevitably, somebody says, “We need to contact every customer to tell them this!” and then everyone realizes that nobody has a real customer list. 

For B2B companies, it’s not a trivial task; you’ve got all the businesses who have bought something for you. They may or may not be using it anymore. There are probably multiple contacts: the person who decides what to buy, the people who use it, the people who are authorized to call for support, the people who need to be notified about downtime, the person who gets the invoice, and so on. Yes, it’s complicated. 

I would think it would be easier if you sold to consumers (where there’s typically just one person to keep track of). And even easier if you sell a service that you send a bill for every month. It should be really simple: who’d we send bills to last month? Those are our customers. 

But I got this email about the upcoming switch to digital television broadcasting in the United States (click to enlarge):

It’s something that cable companies are required to send out. It explains options for dealing with your old analog television sets (including - surprise! - ordering cable for them). That’s all fine. 

Except that I’m not a customer of Time Warner. I haven’t been since Comcast became the local cable provider in Houston last year. 

Sounds like there are some data issues at Time Warner. I wonder if this internal dialog went something like this:

“We need to send this email to all of our online billing customers who won’t see it in a paper statement.”

“Okay, let’s get the list.” 

“Um, nobody can actually get that list out of our billing systems.”

“Well, let’s send it to every email address in every database we’ve got!”

That happens more than we’d like to think.

The time to find out that your customer database is a mess is not the day you figure out that you need to send a notice out to everyone to comply with a government regulation or announce your exciting merger. That’s just the day it becomes a real problem. 

Take some time to clean up your customer data. Someday you will probably be very glad you did it. Even if there’s never some urgent communications need, you’ll actually have a great database you can use to find out more about who those customers are and how you might do more business with them. There’s no downside to this, other than the likelihood that you’ll go through a fair amount of Advil during the process. 

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