The Art of Deduplication
August 22, 2016
It is unavoidable and regardless of how much you would like to, you cannot make them birds. Dupes happen. If left untreated, your data can
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It is unavoidable and regardless of how much you would like to, you cannot make them birds. Dupes happen. If left untreated, your data can
It is unavoidable and regardless of how much you would like to, you cannot make them birds. Dupes happen. If left untreated, your data can get really diluted and fractured. I recommend monthly checks. Fortunately, you have tools available to you to help limit them coming in and to remove those that make it into your Org. I am going to help you with some simple solutions that will make your deduping more zen.
Internal Salesforce Duplicate Management
You can set some lead and contact creation restrictions in your salesforce to do a fuzzy search and stop dupes before they even enter your system.
Go to Setup and start here!
Matching Rules – These are used to identify likely duplicates.
Duplication Rules – These decide if you can save a record or not.
Confused? Get Help!
Salesforce provides a ton of help pages to assist in setting these up. Here are some to get you started:
Setting up your matching rules
Setting up your duplicate rules
At the very least Activate the defaults!
NPSP Contact Merge
The Non Profit Starter Pack provides a simple and effective way to merge the random dupe that gets through.
Search – use basic search functionality to find likely duplicates
Select – pick up to three contacts to merge
Merge – choose the main record and merge!
Bring in the Apps!
Sometimes you need to pull in reinforcements, and yes, there is a free app for that. On the Salesforce App Exchange there are many applications that are very helpful in managing your deduplication process and a few are even free! Here are two of Sputnik Moments’ absolute faves!
Consultant’s Choice:
Regardless of the tools you choose, make sure that your organization has a dupe prevention and deduplication process in place. This will ensure the accuracy of your data and make for much happier Salesforce Admins.
