{"id":1482,"date":"2006-04-19T22:51:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-19T22:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2006-04-19T22:51:00","modified_gmt":"2006-04-19T22:51:00","slug":"email-gone-wild","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mhgoldberg.com\/blog\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"Email gone wild!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HHonors\"<\/a>I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. The first message was in German, sent at 9:18pm. Then a message in Spanish at 9:27. English followed at 10:25 and now French came in time stamped 10:27, right after the kind lady at HHonors Customer Help Desk said ‘don’t worry, we have the situation under control and it is now fixed.’<\/p>\n

I called HHonors the first time right after the German message, but they transfered me to a line with no voice mail and I thought ‘oh well, no big deal.’ When the next language came through, I figured it was time to try to get it fixed.<\/p>\n

While I have been on hold in the Hilton call centre, I traced the origins of the email messages. They appear to be legitimate, but errant. It appears that Hilton contracted out this campaign to Epsilon Interactive<\/a> who pride themselves at being able to send out 5M emails per hour. That means that they could have easily sent these messages to the entire HHonors database – at least 4 times.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that improved email practices can be learned from this incident. Obviously, this is an accident. But one of the problems I faced in trying to notify Hilton about a problem is that no one at their call centre is even aware of the campaign, there is no phone number in the message, there is no escalation process.<\/p>\n

I wonder if any of the people in charge of email campaigns make a point of being included in every mailing – just so that they can see problems as they are happening. Clearly, that isn’t the practice at Hilton.<\/p>\n

As a result, the easiest recourse for their Gold level members (the target of this campaign) is to filter out all email from HHonors, or unsubscribe completely. That is the last thing that Hilton wanted from this campaign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. The first message was in German, sent at 9:18pm. Then a message in Spanish at 9:27. English followed at 10:25 and now French came in time stamped 10:27, right after the kind lady at HHonors Customer Help Desk said ‘don’t …<\/p>\n

Email gone wild!<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","two_page_speed":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEmail gone wild! • Telecom Trends<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. 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