Santa's making his list, he'll be checking it twice if he doesn't cleanse his database!

It was that one Christmas, we all remember it.

We didn’t get the present we wanted. It wasn’t just a bit wrong, it was so totally NOT what we had written on our little lists that we couldn’t comprehend where Santa has rustled this alien present idea from. Yes, it would have been something that we could have liked last year maybe, but we were so much older and more mature now that there’s no way we could take that present to school and show it off.

You see, dear Santa obviously hadn’t cleansed his database. Had he done this, he would have known that your profile had changed and he wouldn’t have gotten you mixed up with the kid next door who was a year younger than you.

So we’ve hit the nail on the head – the low quality database that Santa has, has ruined Christmas. Not only has a young child been left with a toy they don’t want or need, they now are hating on dear old Santa who was only trying to do his job. And what do kids do? They tell their friends.

“What did you get for Christmas?”

“Well Santa didn’t understand what I wanted and got me what I wanted last year! He’s so outdated!”

You see how this is going right? Santa’s reputation is slowly being chipped away, he’s leaving a bad taste and the kids aren’t afraid to let people know.

It could be a case of you receiving what you wanted the year prior, or if you moved house – maybe the gift went there? Or maybe he spelled the address wrong and it’s just in a different country altogether, or what if that kid nearby with the same name as you had received it? Either way, Santa should really get with the times and cleanse his database because that Christmas was a total write off.

He could start with contact and address cleansing. Any wishlists he receives should be checked against the PAF database (/ the database relevant database to that country) and he can ensure he corrects misspelled addresses and postcodes and keep all the addresses standardised and in the correct format.

Then, Santa can perform de-duplications. He can identify people with the same name as he can differentiate them based on their other details. For those that have moved, he’s doing a goneaway suppression to find out the families that have moved away so he doesn’t keep sending their presents to that address.

Finally, his database should be profiled. Demographically. He can then identify crucial market segments and from that perform analysis on what’s cool one year and what’s not so trendy.

I think you already know where I’m going with this. The Santas of the adult world are businesses and shops and without a cleansed database, they can really gain a bad reputation whether it’s Christmas or not. The best thing to do would be to validate details at point of entry, but many companies need their databases cleansed also as too many bogus entries have slipped through the net. It’s an easy fix and definitely something that is not worth losing reputation points over. So don’t be a bad Santa – it’ll get you a frosty reputation and that’s snow laughing matter as you don’t want the Claus coming out this Christmas.