[App Review] Duplicate Data? Oh No! No Place for that in my Salesforce Org! Can you say that?

Last Updated on August 8, 2021 by Rakesh Gupta

P.S.:- Today, I am going to review Duplicate Check for Salesforce.

Interested in achieving, and maintaining, an air-tight data integrity? Then, don’t be duped by duplicate records in your system. Duplicate data occur when an exact copy of a record is created as a separate entry in the same system. The problem is compounded when an organization uses multiple platforms. As a result, the presence of duplicate data becomes a major impediment in achieving and maintaining, data integrity. Absence of data integrity severely impacts users’ ability to make, and rely on, business decisions based on duplicate data. Therefore, the issue of duplicate data has to be addressed in earnest!

A study by Experian found that as many as 94% of organizations suspect that their customer, and prospect, data may be inaccurate. According to experts, duplication rates between 10%–30% are not uncommon for companies without data quality initiatives in place. Furthermore, research from the Data Warehouse Institute maintains that data quality problems costs, U.S. businesses, more than $600 billion every year. And, it concludes that, duplicate records affects a company in a variety of ways and results in measurable costs.

Sometimes, when managing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of records, an organization may end up with some duplicates. This can be frustrating because the organization might have imperative information stored on one record, but not on other – even though both the records belong to the same person! Weaning out duplicate data, from millions of records, is a Hercules task indeed – to say the least!

The importance of having a clean, and reliable, Salesforce org should never be underestimated. Yet, the best-laid plans are often thwarted by a combination of human error and inconsistent naming conventions. 

In light of the above screenshots, the question arises – do the three entries, for Mr. Rakesh Gupta, belong to three different individuals or to a single individual? Could the three entries be a result of careless data entry by different sales reps? It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify whether or not the records are legitimate data entries or duplicates.

Impact of duplicate data on your business:

1. Costs and lost productivity
2. Lack of a single customer view
3. Wasted marketing budget
4. Disjoined customer service
5. Bad brand reputation
6. Last but not least, storage Cost

How to Achieve, and Maintain, Data De-duplication?

We just established that, duplicate data is expensive! Now, let us take a look at how to avoid this pothole! We will do so by developing, and implementing, various checks and balances known as, data deduplication.

Data deduplication refers to a series of techniques and strategies that are used to eliminate redundant data in a database. In a successful de-duplication campaign, extra duplicate copies of a record are deleted, leaving only one unique copy of the record in question.

Data de-duplication systems analyze byte patterns to identify duplicate copies of the same record. Typically, the extra copies are merged, or deleted, and replaced with a reference that routes back to the remaining permanent record.

How Does Salesforce handle De-Duplication?

Out-of-the-box, Salesforce offers duplicate management only for few objects – like Lead, Account, Contact and custom objects. Furthermore, Salesforce’s duplicate management features prevent the materialization of duplicate data only at the time of record creation or update.

Business Use case: – Suzanne Schneider is working as a System Administrator at Gurukul on Cloud (GoC). Suzanne just realized that there are thousands of duplicate leads in her org. As a result, she is looking for some expert help to merge duplicate leads automatically so that, her company can save time and money.

In light of the above, Suzanne knows that, Salesforce’s Out-of-the-box duplicate management system will not solve her duplicate lead problem. This is because, leads in her org are already created and, the Out-of-the-box Salesforce duplicate management system doesn’t have the capability to automatically identify, and merge, existing records. If you are a Salesforce developer then, you can write some complex batch Job to solve this problem (But then, it would require investing organization’s precious time and money).

Introducing Duplicate Check – An AppExchange app

Cleaning up duplicates, in any org, is massively time-consuming – that is why, prevention is better than cure. I tried many apps and stumbled upon –  Duplicate Check for Salesforce app on AppExchange. The app does the following: 

• Finds Duplicates – Create jobs to run at a specified time. The app will analyze and deduplicate your entire database based on your preference – This is my favorite so far.  
• Prevents Duplicates – Prevents the generation of duplicate records at the time of creating or update using cross object reference.
• Merges Duplicates – Automatically merges duplicate records thereby, saving hundreds of hours of looking for a needle in a haystack – This is my second favorite! 
• The best part is, everything happens inside the Org. This means that, no data transfer is needed in order to find and remove duplicates.
• The App dedupes data in standard, as well as, custom objects.

Read more about this app here. 

Use Case #1 – Prevent duplicate record upon creation

Once your Salesforce is clean, you don’t want duplicates to return. Duplicate Check alerts your users, in real-time, when a record is being created if a similar record already exists. The app can prevent every duplicate record from entering the org – irrespective of how a record enters a Salesforce org.

The app prevents users from creating duplicate records across all Objects – this comes in very handy when you want to cross-check contacts before creating a lead. One of the best features is that, the app does a real-time duplicate check after every field you populate! 

Use Case #2 – Manually Merge 15 records at a time

The app allows you to merge duplicate records quickly – either manually or automatically. It is even possible to schedule your deduplication process – from finding duplicates to merging them, without any user interaction. 

You can merge up to 15 records at once. 

Use Case #3 – Create scheduled jobs to detect duplicate records and auto-merge

The deduplication process, via Duplicate Check, can be completely automated. Configure your scheduled batch once (#1), sit back and let the Duplicate Check do the trick. 

Duplicate Check is able to schedule Duplicate Check Jobs to find duplicate records in Salesforce. In the process of setting up a new job, you have the ability to schedule the job to run automatically at a frequency that you decide. You can run the job every night and enable auto-merge (#2) duplicate records.

So, why mess around with duplicate data and generate a shadow of doubt on your org’s data integrity and veracity of your reports and dashboard? Why tie hands of C-Level executives by feeding them inaccurate data that result in questionable decisions? Why waste an organization’s precious time and money? Why not invest in a tool that builds confidence in your organization’s data and decisions? If you ask me, it is really a no-brainer.

Proofreader: - Munira Majmundar