Duplicate Detection in CRM
Managing duplicates in CRM has been one of the questions that Clients ask very often, and they are right too as duplication of data may not result in giving them correct insights cause its very common that people may not search for records before adding new contacts, leads or accounts in CRM. This is where Duplicate detection helps them in ensuring that accurate data resides in database.
Duplicate detection can be set by creating rules, for example you may want to warn user prompt it if they are attempting to create or update account/contact with duplicate email, name, account number, address, etc.
However I have always believed that it depends what fields you think are good candidates to identify potential duplicates and it may vary from business to business. You can’t have same duplicate detection rules for all of them.
For example, warning users if they input a new Contact in the same zip code as an existing one would be a bad idea and very frustrating for users. It is very likely they will have more than one Contact in the same city with the same zip code.
In my implementations I have observed that it’s much better to warn them if the new Contact has the same first and last name, address line 1 and city is a more useful rule but again that’s not failsafe. For example James Smith is a very common name and it’s very likely that an organization may have two James Smith working at the same address. In scenarios like this it is advisable to use unique fields such as email address or mobile (cell) phone are good contenders for duplicate detection.
I am listing a few common questions that I have encountered.
- Do the duplication rules prevent the creation of the records in the system or is it just warning?
When a user creates a record by hand, it is just a warning. When you use data import, you can tell it to discard all new duplicates (or to ignore the rules). To stop the record from being created, you may have to handle this through a code which will prevent the record from being created.
- What happens to the records that are already in the system before the rules are added/created?
Blunt answer is you can’t do anything about it, however you can choose to run a duplicate detection job against some or all existing records. And analyze the results to clean them up (typically by merging records, for Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Cases). Do remember that you will not be able to use Merge feature on other system or custom entities which you may have created.