Qantas sent me a Marketing email under some else's name!

[Cameron779]

Has anyone experienced being sent a Marketing email by Qantas but the email is to someone else?
instead of getting an email with greeting Dear Cameron I got a Marketing email from Qantas using Dear Julian.
this concerns me! Is the personal information has been breached ? From the technology perspective- I have no idea how this happens.
Have seen QF an email regarding this but heard no reply
anyone any ideas?

 

[RooFlyer]

Welcome to AFF Cameron779.

I recall we had a discussion maybe a year ago about something similar. I'll try to find it.
Edit: It was in January this year. This thread; not sure how similar the situation is, though.

In general, I regard Qantas' IT as so weak that anything is possible.

 

[Cameron779]

Thank you
i heard about this one too but my scenario is totally different. I presume Marketing email is a different animal to sending eticket receipts.
the e-ticket is sent by a human being so mistanke happens. But Marketing email are robotics which concerns me even more...

 

[madrooster]

Thank you
i heard about this one too but my scenario is totally different. I presume Marketing email is a different animal to sending eticket receipts.
the e-ticket is sent by a human being so mistanke happens. But Marketing email are robotics which concerns me even more...

E-tickets are also sent by robotics...

 

[EestiTiger]

Maybe poorly scrubbed test data or testing breaking through the controls that should contain it.

 

[eric2011]

I'm going through a period of getting a lot of Spam emails from (allegedly Qantas) and looking quite authentic until you start looking closely at where its come from

 

[Jack_OC]

E-tickets are also sent by robotics...

The previous debacle was not actually related to sending out e-tickets. QF decided to send out emails about Tullamarine Freeway closures to anyone with a QF booking from MEL on the relevant days. For some bizarre reason, they chose to include the name of the passenger and their booking confirmation number in those emails - rather than simply send the same generic notification to everyone. The source of the error, according to the explanation I got from QF, was that someone accidentally mis-sorted an Excel spreadsheet containing the details of the affected customers, and then did a "mail merge", which resulted in every single person on the list receiving someone else's details.

So the previous issue was indeed caused by human error (or on a more fundamental level, by QF's reliance on a manual process). That said, I don't see any reason to assume that the process for generating a targeted email regarding a freeway closure would be any different to that for generating a targeted marketing email, so my guess is that the root cause of this latest failure is probably similar to the last one.

 

[oz_mark]

I'd look first at whether it is a genuine email from Qantas. If so, some sort of error has occurred. It happens. Just ask Wilson Parking

 

[Cameron779]

The previous debacle was not actually related to sending out e-tickets. QF decided to send out emails about Tullamarine Freeway closures to anyone with a QF booking from MEL on the relevant days. For some bizarre reason, they chose to include the name of the passenger and their booking confirmation number in those emails - rather than simply send the same generic notification to everyone. The source of the error, according to the explanation I got from QF, was that someone accidentally mis-sorted an Excel spreadsheet containing the details of the affected customers, and then did a "mail merge", which resulted in every single person on the list receiving someone else's details.

So the previous issue was indeed caused by human error (or on a more fundamental level, by QF's reliance on a manual process). That said, I don't see any reason to assume that the process for generating a targeted email regarding a freeway closure would be any different to that for generating a targeted marketing email, so my guess is that the root cause of this latest failure is probably similar to the last one.

Sending maketing email using the data from a spreadsheet?! Geez,Would airline like the scale Qantas be that behind of technology
my presumption is that they may using a convoluted IT process to pull mmembet data and send the marketing emails and somehow it got cached.
but still it breached privacy policy apparently

 

[AustraliaPoochie]

They (QF) are trying to save as much money as possible, and that is how mistakes happen.
Eg, they couldn't afford to pay RR to spend time on here, or they save money by reducing the Qpoints earn on QCC purchases in Aust, they saved money by reducing the SC earn ADL - SYD one way from 15 to 10 a long time ago, etc...
No more than one human to do as much as possible, and no one to double check.
I don't believe robots are smart enough (YET) to be able to do something from the start of a task to full completion.
A human must (for the time being) initiate the start of the task.
But scary that it did happen to the OP.