Ever since I first started following the customer relationship management market in the dim and distant past, the lack of attention paid by companies to the quality of the data they hold has always galled me.

From a customer point of view, I'm sure that all of us have received letters sent to a misspelt name, or where the gender title has been assumed, and has been assumed wrongly.

Just as bad (or worse) is multiple copies of the same missive just because the company in question has multiple records of us - C Longbottom, Mr C Longbottom, Clive S Longbottom, and so on.

Not only does this affect customer satisfaction, it has a direct cost on the company concerned.

For those using paper-based communications, the cost of creating, enveloping and sending such communications soon adds up, and for those in areas such as catalogue marketing the cost is considerable for each catalogue sent.

Beyond such simplicity, there are other data issues that should also be weeded out before any harm is caused.

I was reading about a woman who found that her tax code had been changed to zero. On calling the Inland Revenue, she found that this was because as far as the IR was concerned, she had been declared bankrupt.

An IR employee had been going through the bankruptcy court records, had seen this person's name and her town, and that was enough information.

That there were many people with the same name in the same town was neither here nor there, and it seems that a stab in the dark was enough.

However, if intelligent data cleansing had been used, the IR employee would have been able to more closely match the available information from the court record with the record in the IR database.

In fact it could have been automated, saving time and money while being more accurate and less prone to any issues.