Managing Duplicate Data in Your Salesforce CRM

Duplicate data is a major cause of concern for businesses.

In order to make the most of your CRM, you need to maintain clean and accurate data.

In fact, a duplicate-free CRM enables you to drive customer success.

In this blog post, we look at the need for deduping in Salesforce, the limitations of Salesforce-native deduplication, as well as how you can overcome them.

Why You Need to Deduplicate Your Salesforce CRM

The need for deduping your Salesforce CRM is twofold:

• Preventing duplicate records from entering your org
• Eliminating existing duplicates

In fact, duplicate records in Salesforce lead to:

• Inflated forecasts
• Missed sales opportunities
• Ineffective decision-making
• Poor customer experience

While Salesforce-native deduplication addresses the challenge of duplicate data, there are limitations.

Let’s take a look.

Inability to Automatically Find and Merge Duplicates

In Salesforce, you need to manage duplicates manually.

This means that individual duplicates need to be opened and reviewed to merge matching accounts, whether in Salesforce Classic or Lightning.

For organizations that have multiple records, this results in excess utilization of limited resources.

Limited Ability of Salesforce Algorithms

Algorithms in Salesforce only factor in certain fields, i.e, name, email address, phone, and company name.

This makes it difficult to find hidden duplicates among millions of customer records.

Difficulty in Selecting Master Records and Fields

In Salesforce, the oldest records are selected as master records during merge.

For example, if you have duplicates with two email addresses, the oldest records will be carried over.

Inability to Implement Cross-Object Matching and Converting

Salesforce does not allow you to convert leads to existing contacts.

Therefore, you cannot view a combined list of leads and existing contacts or merge them at the same time.

• Only Merge 3 Records At a Time

You can only merge only three records at a time when viewing a group of duplicate records.

• No Duplicate Management for Custom Objects

The potential duplicates component cannot be added to custom objects in Lightning Experience.

Additionally, you cannot manage duplicates in custom objects with Salesforce Classic.

How to Manage Duplicate Data in Your Salesforce CRM

At Grazitti, the CRM wizards have built Dupe Manager.

The solution enables you to overcome the limitations of Salesforce-native deduplication and steer clear of bad data.

Here’s what Dupe Manager enables you to do:

• Auto-detect duplicates using predefined rules
• Merge data from child and parent records
• Customize filter logic
• Merge standard and custom objects based on predefined rules
• Schedule deduping to check for duplicates
• Update field values while merging records you’ve selected

In a Nutshell

In this blog post, we looked at the challenges with data deduplication in Salesforce, as well as how you can address them.

A CRM free from inaccuracy, inconsistency, and duplicacy enables you to power customer success, as well as business growth.

Overcome the Limitations of Duplicate Management on Salesforce