Suggestions please

[davywavy]

As a part of my job, one thing that we do is collect a lot of information from people by telephone. In order to do this, and to process it, we need to be able to prove to external auditors at a later date that we spoke to the person - and the way this is done is by asking the people we speak to Person identifier questions, or PIQs.
These are difficult to select, and we have to change them regularly in order to demonstrate that our information is up to date and to indicate how old the information is (For example, if we asked Question X in 2005, it would demonstrate that the information was gathered in that year, and we have to change the question for 2006 and not use the 2005 question again for a very long time).

The problem this hits is that people are predictably and understandably wary of giving out personal information to a complete stranger over the phone, and so questions like Date of birth, name of first pet, name of first teacher and so on which are often used as identifier questions by banks and email companies are just right out because people simply won't tell.

I'm pimping for suggestions from you lot as to questions we can use in future. The information we need to gather has to be sufficiently precise to that person that it's very unlikely we couldn't have just made it up, whilst being sufficiently bland that people are not likley to mind giving it out to strangers over the 'phone. Successful questions in the past have been things like "County of Birth", or "Last two digits of home phone number". Have you lot any suggestions of the sort of things we could ask?

Comments

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

What was the first album/single/cd you ever bought?

[vulgarcriminal.livejournal.com]

Brand of vibrator.

[flywingedmonkey.livejournal.com]

Fav Buffy or Lost character?

JmC
Faith and probably Hurley

[(Anonymous)]

Star sign?

H

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Month of {mother, father}'s birth? (I discount "partner" because enough people won't have one to make life difficult)

[uninvitedcat.livejournal.com]

Name of first school?

[tooth-fairy.livejournal.com]

Hospital born in
Primary School
Secondary School

[blue-cat.livejournal.com]

make of car?
Prefered drink?
Favorite animal?

First 2 letters of their work street name.

Year they left school/education

[cryx]

shoe size
last holiday destination
favourite beverage
favourite colour
height
inside leg? *ahem*

[hiromasaki.livejournal.com]

Half Full or Half Empty? (Please refrain from getting philosophical.)

Twinkies or Zingers? (May be too US-Centric.)

Vanilla or Chocolate?

Vanilla or Kinky? (Or not.)

[gwaunquest.livejournal.com]

Type of shampoo used (also other household consumabubles)
Newspaper or magazine subscription.
Type of front door.
Size of TV
Number of CDs in their cd collection.

[kcontheroad.livejournal.com]

You have to pick something that won't change, too, so that they'll remember it if asked again. Number of CDs or favourite whatever may not work. Hmmm.

Colour of your first car/bicycle/transport
Third letter of second name (or of name of parent or whatever)
Year you landed your first paid work
Number of windows on the front of the building where you live.
Nearest plant to your front door.

[azekeil.livejournal.com]

The weather in their location that day? (verifiable)