We screwed up today. One of our regular direct mail shots has gone out with names and surnames mixed up for some recipients. (See my comment below for an update.)
Before I say anything else, I just want to say a very big sorry to those who have received the mailing with incorrect names on. I get frustrated when people spell my name wrong, so it must be really annoying to get a mailing with a totally wrong first name (and wrong salutation in some cases).
We use mailing data from a number of respected sources in the PR industry and the mail merge and fulfillment is handled by a third-party mailing house. It looks on the face of it that something has gone wrong during the mail merge. I appreciate this kind of mistake looks really shoddy and I'm determined to get to the bottom of it to make sure it doesn't happen again, but one thing I can say for sure is that this does not reflect the quality of our media database or other services we provide.
I'm really sorry
about this and I'd like to extend my sincerest apologies to anyone who
received incorrectly addressed items from us in this mailing. See my comment below for an update on what went wrong. Oh, and thanks to Ellie for bringing this to my attention.
I've just heard back from the third party mailing house we use. They identified that some of the names got mixed up during the process where the mailing is split into postcode regions before being labelled up and despatched. It appears less than 4 per cent of the mailing was affected.
Despite being a relatively small proportion this is of course no comfort to those affected and it should never have happened in the first place. We'll be working with our supplier to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Posted by: Daryl Willcox | October 09, 2008 at 11:59