Orgs with large amounts (or even moderate amounts) of data will face its share of challenges, and one of the most common is maintaining the quality of that data. The biggest enemy to data quality is duplicate records. Duplicate records can be a large strain on your team’s productivity, if your team doesn’t have a plan in place to monitor & address it. Whether it be a rep of yours reaching out to a contact that they don’t own or a marketing campaign reaching out to a lead or contact multiple times – duplicate records can have a negative downstream impact. The effects of duplicate records can make your team look disorganized or waste a contact/leads time with mismanaged marketing or prospecting efforts. Luckily there are several tools available to help with these efforts. Although there are several tools available on the AppExchange, we want to point out the native Salesforce tools available to your Org.
Salesforce duplicate management allows your team to set up a series of rules & matching criteria to help identify duplicate records at different times. You can set your rules to notify your reps that they are potentially entering a duplicate record, or maybe you want to completely block this potential duplicate altogether? You can also allow potential duplicates to be created & then review at a later date through Salesforce reporting.
When beginning to construct your duplicate management approach, it is important to understand the two main elements that make up duplicate management in Salesforce:
· Duplicate Rules
o A duplicate rule defines what happens when a user views a record with duplicates or starts creating a duplicate record. Salesforce provides standard duplicate rules for business and person accounts, contacts, and leads. You can also create duplicate rules.
· Matching Rules
o A matching rule defines how duplicate records are identified in duplicate rules and duplicate jobs. Salesforce provides standard matching rules for business and person accounts, contacts, and leads. You can also create custom matching rules.
We’ve mentioned a few key reasons for why duplicate management is important – but one that should not be forgotten is your maintaining your Reps trust. With a solid approach to handling duplicate records, your Reps can confidently manage their contacts and leads – knowing another rep hasn’t already managed the record. Keeping your Reps trust, is vital to ensuring their success while using the Salesforce tool. Our team has extensive experience building out custom matching & duplicate rules for standard objects, as well as custom objects too.