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For more than seven years I have been getting offers for credit cards from Airlines and Banks. One particular bank has been sending me these solicitations for more than seven years. That is 12 mailings per year, more than 72 mailings so far, remember these are physical paper mailings not the electronic kind. I don't like the junk, it hurts the environment and worst of all I think its not good use of the data they have. How hard is it to design a system around the data they have.

Lets say they have a table of all the targeted customers they want to send a credit card applications to, why not have a attribute on the table for counting how many times the solicitation was sent, or they can even have the date the first solicitation was sent.

Customer
    Name
    Address
    City
    FirstSolicitationSent

or

Customer
    Name
    Address
    City
    Solicitations

So they could say if the days between today and the firstSolicitationSent is more than 90 days, then not send another solicitation, or if this number so solicitations is more than three do not send another solicitation.

This allows them to not send solicitations for years and ultimately loose the customer, I understand the argument of the customer needing time to react to the solicitation, but seven years of trying to convert a prospect is pure waste of time and effort. The data available can be used in better ways.

Okay this is kind of a rant, maybe I'm too picky or just that I hate to see perfectly good data not being used. This is how it goes..

I go regularly to this store to get Horizon organic milk for my family, about 60% of the time I see milk I need NOT in stock, okay I can live with that, may be lots of folks are buying organic milk, but not when it happens frequently, especially when the store knows how much milk was ordered (or supplied from the warehouse) and how much milk was sold, the store should be able to figure out that organic milk gets sold out pretty fast, putting my Business Intelligence (BI) hat on, I think the store should be able to predict when they are going to run out of organic milk ( for that matter any product), its especially frustrating when they have all the data they need to get it done.

One more non usage of data that really makes me red is, when the organic milk in the store is already expired (past the sell by date). I mean how hard is it for someone to generate a list of all the products that expire today and ask the store associates to remove them from the shelves by the end of the day, especially when its edible items.