When we moved our credit control team to a new telephone system, one of the features we were most pleased with was screen popping. When a customer rings, the phone system looks up the caller's number in our customer system and opens their account on the agent's screen before the call is answered. In the pilot it worked for the team's test accounts.
After go live it recognised fewer than a third of callers. Agents asked every caller for their account number, as they always had, and the feature we had paid extra for became a source of complaints.
The cause was in our data, not the phone system. The phone system passes the caller's number in international format, a plus sign and the country code followed by digits. Our customer system held phone numbers in a free text field that had been typed in by hand for fifteen years by sales staff, credit controllers and customers on a web form. When an analyst exported the field she found it written in more than forty patterns: with spaces in different places, with brackets around the area code, with the international prefix and without it, with dashes, with an extension added after the letters ext, and in a few thousand records with two numbers separated by a slash. The lookup compared the incoming number with the field exactly, so a number with a single space in it never matched.
Nobody had entered anything wrong. Every one of those numbers could be dialled by a person. We had stored them for people to read and then asked a machine to match them.
The phone numbers are now held in a standard international format, with no spaces or punctuation, alongside the original text, which is kept for display. A clean up job converted about ninety percent automatically, and the credit controllers corrected the rest over two months as customers rang. New numbers are validated and converted as they are entered, extensions go in their own field and each contact can have more than one number. The lookup now matches about eighty five percent of calls, and most of the remainder are withheld or calling from numbers we have never held.
Data typed for a person to read is not ready for a machine to compare. We had not noticed the difference until the machine started asking.
– Serguey Shinder
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