ElectionLeaflets.org

In an amazing feat of Not Getting It, a young man from Experian QAS has been phoning round all the former users of EarnestMarples.com trying to get us to buy their post-code lookup file to better serve our customers.

The conversation went on for at least 20 minutes after I had made clear that (a) TheStraightChoice.org didn’t have any money, (b) we are morally against this Postcode information being private (the whole justification of the EarnestMarples site), (c) even if we did want to buy it we’d get it direct from the Royal Mail, and (d) we’re now using the freely available google geocoding API (which he hadn’t heard about).

Add to that, this postcode data is supposed to be made free this year, in spite of high level difficulties.

So what was so good about their product, which was fully derived from the Postcode Address File?

Well, the PAF is apparently not in a very good format, and they have to spend 42 man hours per month to fix up for every release, and they add corrections (including changing I’s to 1’s and vice versa), and improve on its area naming, and shrink the file size down by a factor of 5 to make it more useful to commercial organizations.

My goodness, this is a damning indictment of the PAF, whose management has a budget of £18million, with numerous board executives and staff and Postcomm reviews, and so forth.

Indeed it is, I was told. And QAS, which is backed by very prestigious and successful Experian company (with really stupid salesmen, or they wouldn’t have called me), fix it up so well that the Royal Mail buys our postcode lookup product for use in their call centres.

This is known as a customer endorsement. And what better customer to endorse your added-value than the one who sold you the data in the first place! (Shame this one is not included in their page of customer case studies.)

I’m sure what he claims is not strictly true, because what Royal Mail will have done is outsourced all their call centre needs to an Indian company, who will have bought in the QAS Experian product as part of their commercial package — rather than actually taking advantage of the special-case efficiencies due to this particular customer.

But as all our great managing class knows, outsourcing is always better in the larger term, no matter how many specific and provable inefficiencies it raises. It’s a matter of faith. And this article of faith feeds back to the sales pitch by the assumption that if the Royal Mail is buying back its own data, then that proves it is better, rather than just being one more example of a long series of deranged economic structures that make money for the wrong people.

If the PAF was made public, this kind of nonsense wouldn’t happen, because people would say: don’t sell me the corrections, why don’t you put them back into the dataset? I mean, Wikipedia has a lot of very useful data in it, and nobody sells improved copies of it around the place. People understand. But with private corporate data, it can happen, even though the management of Postcomm document explains:

7.39. PAF accuracy is important to PAF customers, and broadly speaking the more accurate PAF is the better. Under the Act, Royal Mail is required to maintain PAF so that it is capable of being used to encourage good addressing. Therefore, Royal Mail should work with the advisory board towards an appropriate measurement system, targets, performance measurement, reporting, and formal arrangements with data suppliers.

But as long as there are enough fools to buy this old rope to fund at least one salesman to waste his pitiful life phoning round all possible users, this business will continue.

Now excuse me, I have a company to set up for selling people train timetables.

But first a letter to the PAF board:

Dear Sir,

I have just had a call from a representative of QAS explaining that their PAF derived product is superior to the data obtainable directly from Royal Mail because theirs contains corrections and other formatting improvements.

This concerns me, as I would have assumed that the best data should be available from source, and that the resellers should be returning any errors they find back to the primary database, rather than casting assertions about the accuracy in order to drum up business.

Also, according to the “management of PAF Final report April 2007″ available at the Postcomm website,

7.31. Royal Mail should publish:
* its process for measuring PAF quality;
* PAF accuracy target;
* actual performance; and
* analysis of exceptions or failures against target and steps to be taken to ensure targets are met.

In order to clarify the situation about the accuracy for when I in future receive such calls from salesmen, can you please point me to where the above information is published?

Thank you