My girlfriends and I like to go play Bingo. We tell ourselves it is to have time away from husbands, partners and children and have a good chin wag, but we also love winning. When we don’t win, we do the Bingo Walk of Shame (yes, it is a thing) and tell ourselves it is the price we pay for taking time out to reconnect with each other.
Imagine my delight when I received a £5 off voucher from my local Bingo Hall. Well, I received my £5 off voucher as well as 3 other Bingo-goers £5 off voucher! There seem to have been a problem with the drying process on the vouchers which made them stick to each other. My local postman did not pick up on this fact either, so as mine was top of the 4, I got everyone else’s mail. Having purchased Transactional & Marketing Print for a number of years, all the alarm bells went off around Data Protection, Supplier Management, etc. Now, I am an honest sort and tore up the vouchers and put them into separate bins, but had I been a nefarious type I could easily have used the data supplied on the Bingo cards to steal or sell the identities of my fellow Bingo-goers or worse!
The question therefore is: we trust organizations with our personal details, they in turn trust their suppliers to do the right thing (with or without a contract detailing exactly what are the duty of care, penalties for misbehavior etc.). However, in this instance even if those save-guards were in place, Bingo failed its customers. When Print and Distribution Contracts state that there should be a 100% delivery, who makes certain that this is actually achieved? Whose responsibility was it for all those vouchers to have been delivered to the right recipient; Bingo’s, their Printer or the Distribution company? Ultimately, we are Bingo’s customers, so the buck stops at Bingo.
A robust and fail-safe Third Party Supplier Risk Management should be top of Bingo's list to ensure that this situtation does not happen again in the future.
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