Salesforce: Preventing Data Corruption and Duplication

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Is Your Salesforce Data Really Safe?

The value of data cannot be overstated in today’s world. Accurate data sets can be used to devise strategies, execute plans, track business performance, and make process improvements. Businesses that use CRM solutions such as Salesforce should have plans in place to ensure that their valuable data is not corrupted or duplicated.

Data corruption can occur due to a problem in a company’s process or Salesforce settings, or even through no fault of their own. For example, on May 10, 2016, a major Salesforce outage resulted in a large portion of data being corrupted. This blog will help you prevent the losses and duplications that you can control—and potentially correct with some settings or additional apps in Salesforce.

Common Ways in Which Data Gets Corrupted

While there are a practically unlimited causes for data corruption and de-duplication, the most common issues occur on data entry into the Salesforce platform. Salesforce uses certain pieces of data to identify whether a user added to the system should be considered “new,” meaning not currently present in the system. These data points can be controlled in Salesforce, but they generally include some combination of email address, first name, and last name. A duplicate record is entered if Salesforce cannot match the new entry with an existing lead, contact or account.

Common Ways in Which Data Gets Corrupted

This can occur when:

  • A sales representative is manually entering data and mistypes something, or uses a different piece of information, for example a branch location address instead of headquarters.
  • A user supplies different information depending on the touch point, for example a different email address when speaking to customer service versus filling out an online form; also a married versus a maiden name.

The same issues can occur during a data import. The end result are duplicate records in the system, and incorrect reporting on your results. The situation is compounded the longer the duplicate or inaccurate record lives in the system: Future touchpoints, proposals, presentations, cases, etc. get appended to one of the duplicate records, but not the other. Repeat the process and it’s not long before you have two or more records that contain a partial record of the customer.

As human mistakes are inevitable, the question becomes how best to identify and remove the issues on an ongoing basis, catching duplicates before the data attached to them gets messy.

Native Salesforce Tools

Salesforce provides two main tools to prevent duplications and potential corruption in your data.

  • There are configuration options under your set up that prevent duplicates from being entered into the system. These tools allow you to identify data points that should be unique—for example, first name, last name, and email—and then compares them for a match against your existing records when new data is added. If one of the data points is matched, the system alerts you that a potential duplicate has been found and provides tools to add the contact anyway or merge it with another record. These configuration options apply both to data that is entered manually or comes in from an import or form like Salesforce Marketing Cloud Accounting Engagement (formerly known as Pardot).
  • The second option is available through reporting and is used to identify all potential duplicates in the system with options to merge or delete the repeated entries. In the QuickFind menu under reporting, search for Duplicate Report. You can choose to run this against your lead, contact, or account records. The report will list all of the duplicates based on the business rules you select, and then you can determine whether to merge or delete.

Third-Party AppExchange or Services to Review Data

In addition to the tools offered by Salesforce, there are a variety of third-party apps that can be used to deduplicate data. These apps either run outside of Salesforce or within the platform. For example, Duplicate Check is a popular option. This app is an all-in-one solution that allows organizations to identify, manage, and merge duplicate records.

Salesforce AppExchange

One of the advantages of most third-party apps is that you can merge duplicates across different entry types, such as leads, accounts, and contacts. These apps are generally more flexible and offer more controls than the default Salesforce features.

For more information on preventing data corruption and whether you can use the standard Salesforce tools or require a third party app, please contact us.

Korcomptenz is a Salesforce Registered Consulting Partner. We’ve been in business for almost 20 years and can get you started on Salesforce by procuring the software, implementing and customizing the platform, importing and integrating your data, and providing full service support. Our seasoned teams of strategic thinkers also help map out your business processes and implement them in Salesforce, all at very cost-effective price points.

We also have proven capabilities in Data Foundation, Data Quality, and Master Data Management and can help you create a transformative data management strategy by providing assessment reports at a department or process area-level along with department-level prioritization plans. We take a templated approach underpinned by assets to deliver exceptional outcomes factoring top-down and bottom-up elements.

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