My email exchanges with TT customer support

[Peter Kessler]

I've now had a reply from the senior manager for GEO LBS Marketing Europe, who says:



As promised to you by our CEO Alain de Taeye, I am contacting you with more specific information regarding your request.

Let me first thank you for your time and efforts to inform us and TomTom of the errors that occured in our database. In your e-mail to Alain, there are several items that require an answer.

1. Your error reporting through TomTom's website

I apologise for the contradicting information you may have received from TomTom and Tele Atlas regarding your error report. This is due to the fact that we are still improving our systems to process end-user feedback received through partners such as TomTom. Thanks to end-user feedback like yours and a continuous effort to increase the quality of our products and services, you should rapidly see improvements on this field in the near term.

With respect to end-user requests sent to Tele Atlas through the TomTom website, our primary focus is to make sure that these comments are fed into our quality and validation processes for increased product quality. Therefore, the current exchange of end-user feedback between TomTom and Tele Atlas is not designed to provide status checks. At the moment, it is not designed to permit Tele Atlas to provide report receipt confirmations either.

The automatic statement generated on the TomTom website informing that you would receive a confirmation is thus incorrect. Thanks to your contribution, we will flag this to TomTom's customer support to avoid any future misunderstandings. Furthermore, I also need to apologise if you have been informed by a Tele Atlas agent that TomTom would respond to you, this is a mistake from our part. Action has now been taken to accelerate the next training planned for our phone agents to avoid providing incorrect or confusing statements.

Finally, on this topic, please be reassured that the absence of an open status tracking to end-users should not be misinterpreted as an absence of corrective actions being taken.

2. Your error reporting through the Tele Atlas call center

In reference to your communication with our customer support last week and the week before, I can confirm that all 50 reports you provided are being checked and will be corrected according to our standard internal quality control requirements. I would like to thank you once again for the detailed report you sent, and the time taken to do so. For your information, the internal case ID for your request is R94521, entered in our internal system by Miss Serena Hamilton. We can already confirm that you correctly diagnosed the errors as a mislabelling of roads in our database, after an initial investigation we see that some of which only applies to one segment of road.

Depending on the root cause of the errors you reported, the time taken for corrections to be reflected in the next release of our database to TomTom and other customers may vary. In essence, this reflects our internal quality processes which require multiple validation of errors reported. It also reflects our concern to give priority to improvements relative to structural changes rather than correction of error instances. As a result, corrective actions are not always visible as of the first Tele Atlas database updated release.

3. The next steps

First, within the next few weeks, one of our call center agents or myself, will provide you with another status update regarding your error report.
Additionally, I would like to invite you to a Tele Atlas office visit we are organising on August 3rd for Mike Barrett (PocketGPSWorld). During this visit, we will attempt to provide more clarity on our database creation processes as well as data capture. We will provide a demonstration of our newest field surveying technology: the Mobile Mapping Van. Should you be interested, please let me know so I can inform my colleagues in charge of this visit.

Finally, I understand that you are an active contributor to the PocketGPSworld forums. We appreciate your contribution to increasing awareness on map data and update related issues in the end-user community. As such, should you want to quote part of this correspondence in a forum, may I kindly request you to not indicate the names and contact information of Tele Atlas employees? Thank you in advance.

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I'm obviously thrilled at the prospect of meeting Mike! - although I don't think I can make that date. Apart from that, here's my reply:

Dear

I really appreciate your letter, and the time you've taken to write it. I'm also glad that my diagnosis was correct, that TomTom's website is going to be corrected, and that your support staff are going to give correct information on this subject in future.

However, the matter of greatest importance to me, and to all users of TeleAtlas data, is the accuracy of the data we are depending on.

Your policy of giving priority to new structures over errors seems to me to be geared more towards gaining new customers than supporting existing ones. I believe this is a short-sighted policy. It may be acceptable in areas where there are just a few errors, but the errors I have reported are of a different magnitude altogether: this is an entire area of north London - possibly one of the key market areas for digital mapping customers - that is completely wrong and virtually useless. It is an exceptional error cluster, and as such, it should be excepted from your usual policy and dealt with immediately.

The situation can be compared to the sudden proliferation of dictionaries in the 18th Century. At the time, dictionaries (like digital mapping today) were a new development, and publishers competed with each other to bring out the dictionary with the most words. In their rush to get more new words into their dictionaries, they didn't bother so much with getting the definitions right, and in the long run the only 18th-century dictionary that survived was Dr Johnson's, which was the most thoroughly researched.

In other words: quality counts more than quantity.

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[jbegg]

Hi Peter,

Well done. Your persistence could pay off - only time will tell. I am always disappointed when reporting errors & mistakes in general to people who are supposed to be accountable. I always feel that they never go the extra yard and answer the nitty gritty of the issue. Teleatlas are no different, they have never explained why they have chose not to act on errors of more than a year old that were reported to them. To say that they prioritise sounds rather lame to me, a convenient catch all copout. I do not mean to sound so critical, it is just that when you look at so many people on these forums and the effort they put into reporting all sorts of errors, it is just criminal that their hard work appears not to receive its just reward.

Just my tuppence worth.

[Peter Kessler]

Latest update on this saga of mis-named roads in London. This came today from TeleAtlas's Senior Manager Marketing Europe:

Dear Peter,

I am pleased to confirm you that thanks to your feedback, the errors you reported have been solved and included in the coming Tele Atlas map data release, which will be delivered to TomTom shortly (planned around October 27th).

You can safely assume that TomTom will include this data in their future product launches. However, I am not sure of the map update strategy that TomTom will choose regarding existing and current products. As you can imagine, this may have some stock impact, as most of the products that will be sold between now and the end of the year are already being distributed through the channels at wholesale level.

Once again, we appreciate your efforts and interest in helping us improve our offering and thank you for this.

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