by Jack Bailey-Grundy 
Salesforce’s Duplicate Management – a duplicate prevention tool which was rolled out as part of an older release, but went largely unheralded and has continued to fly under the radar.
Duplicate management has long been a key focus of Salesforce administrators, and this functionality should be a key tool in every organisation’s arsenal. We’re often asked how best to deal with duplicate records and until now the best solutions were expensive, complicated to set up and often a little bit hit-and-miss. This native solution from Salesforce is a game-changer.
It’s simple to enable this tool in your setup with a 2-step wizard or a 1-click enablement of 3 default ‘matching’ rules. From there Salesforce will monitor new contacts, leads and accounts from creation onwards (even a bulk import) – constantly checking future edits and blocking you from saving any records it believes are duplicated, even on non required fields such as Phone.
So far, so good for a duplicate blocker system. However, 5 key features really help to take this solution above the rest of the field:
1. Whilst most duplicate blocker software can scan between custom and standard fields, Salesforce’s Duplicate Management goes a step further and scans across objects – for example checking whether your new lead is already a contact.
2. Again, whilst most duplicate blockers allow for some form of “fuzzy” logic to match duplicates (picking up duplicates whether a name is Joe Bloggs or Joseph Bloggs) as well as exact matches, Salesforce’s simple set-up, preset methods and matching algorithms are a class above.
3. Duplicate Management can also be easily customised to prevent duplication of your custom objects as well standard ones – ideal for more complex organisations.
4. Administrators strive for clean data whilst end users just want to record the relevant information as quickly, and easily as possible. Salesforce attempts to find a happy medium – Instead of front-end alerts and blocks, Admins can set up reports to track duplicate records creation, and manage the clean-up in the back-end, leaving users to continue with the task at hand.
5. If you require users to take action, this tool does not simply provide an alert. Existing records flagged as potential duplicates are returned in a search box for users to review, click through and edit, or ignore and save a new record.
Avoiding duplication has long been a hot topic for Salesforce customers, so it is great to see this new feature responding to those concerns. And, with rumours of more solutions to aid you in your duplicate management to come, watch this space for more details.
If you’re concerned about the general health and cleanliness of your data, our Salesforce consultants would be happy to get their hands dirty scrubbing your data clean, so do get in touch for a data health check.