When you’re deduplicating records for your org, even if you’re utilising top-of-the-line apps and software, you must pay meticulous attention to the finer details of the initiative. As for adequate preparation, the amount of work required for the task may span a couple of days. We’ll show you how to avoid the common pitfalls here with the Salesforce Duplicate Management feature.
1. Assess Your Org’s Present State
You’ll first need to determine where and when the Duplicate Management feature will be triggered so you can organise your settings around your use cases. Begin identifying the scope of your plan by asking these questions and create rules based on them:
- What are your goals concerning data duplication?
- Have you installed integrations?
- Do you or any of your colleagues import data regularly via data loader?
- Are you using Web-to-Lead functionality?
- Have you implemented any custom code?
- How are you creating data in your org and which team members are responsible for such a task?
- What are your primary pain points in terms of duplication?
2. Define Your Implementation Requirements and Plan
We suggest starting out in a sandboxed environment. Begin by creating a simple rule to demonstrate to your users to get their personal feedback and requirements. If you brazenly launch duplicate management with strict rules, it may actually prevent your users from adding data, disrupting their work.
Thus, it is crucial that you adopt a user-centric approach that will ensure that Duplicate Management will resolve data issues, rather than creating more of them.
3. Implement and Adjust
We recommend implementing a rule or two in the beginning. Then monitor overall progress and how users work with the new rules in place. As your organisation grows and evolves, user requirements are bound to change as well. Duplicate management isn’t a set and forget feature. One could liken it to a garden that requires care, maintenance, and watering.
4. Monitoring Your Org
The Salesforce Duplicate Management tool provides you with a rich feature set to keep track of your org’s rules and to monitor the effectiveness of your Duplicate Management configuration.
We advise creating custom report types so you can you’ll have access to relevant data on the duplicate records and will be able to evaluate the log files periodically. In this manner, it will be possible for you to analyse and ascertain who tends to receive errors. If you’ve set up your rules accordingly, you’ll also be able to check which users can create new records in spite of system-generated warnings.
If this has been occurring in your org, you’ll need to have a conversation with such users to identify the reasons driving their behaviours and their computing needs. The feedback you dig out from the log files and system reports are an excellent place to start to further enhance your implementation of the Duplicate Management rules. They’ll help you tweak your rules to find the right balance between user needs and data integrity.
Once you accomplish that, you’ll have a well-tuned duplicate management system in place that will be working just right for your org and its users.
