Customer data is the soul of an organization. Quality data is priceless and acts as a driver of high productivity and good decision making. Managing Quantity and Quality parallelly has always been a challenge. Same is the case with data now-a days, as the data volumes grew rapidly, the data quality went down, posing a serious challenge in maintaining the sanctity of databases. This challenge of avoiding data duplicity and keeping the orgs clean is faced by almost every company and although it may seem like a trivial issue, the impact these duplicates have on businesses cannot be looked down upon.

All the marketing and service activities revolve around the customer database that a company has.

Duplicates prevailing in a system means:

• Increased cost for marketing campaigns.
• Bombarding the same customers with the same information multiple times, eventually degrading the brand image in the minds of customers.
• Reduced Operational Efficiency.
• Confusion among the sales reps while processing requests.
• Bad service experience encountered by the clients.
• Bad Data leads to Badly informed business decisions.
• Increased challenges in maintaining the database or moving the current system to a new one.

What causes these duplicates:

• Human error “ Sales Rep entering duplicates
• Multiple sources capturing the same information
• No instrument to restrict duplicates from entering the system

Some pointers on how you can keep your Salesforce org clean:

• Think of all the ways the customer data enters your CRM system: Manual customer data Entry by Sales Reps, bulk customer data upload, Automated Lead Sources like web to lead, etc. and ensure that you have them all covered to avoid duplicates entering your CRM system.
• Keep a mandatory field on each Object which handles your customer data, one which is relevant to your business operation like a phone number or an email on Lead. For Standard fields have your tech. team enable Duplicate Rules & Matching rules to avoid duplicates formation and for Custom fields check do not allow duplicates so that Salesforce won’t accept duplicity against that field on the Object and sales rep won’t be able to create duplicate records.
• If your mandatory field is a picklist field, ensure that you enable restricted picklist for that field as Salesforce allows values coming in from external systems other than the field picklist values also.
• Monitor the data that your CRM system is getting from multiple sources to keep an eye if anything wrong is happening around your data so to handle the situation in time. Generally, companies don’t realize this until they have loads of dirty data existing in their CRM systems and then try to recuperate from the damage.
• Ensure that you have clean data while uploading data in bulk into your system.
• Define all your lead sources clearly and distinctly, this can avoid a lot of confusion when leads start to pour-in from multiple channels.
• Make sure your Sales Reps fill all the necessary customer details in the form and instruct them not to save a half-filled form.
• Cloning the records should not be a general habit of the team, this leads to human error of saving the cloned records without making relevant changes and thus creating duplicates. You can even disable the Clone button from the layout if you want to.
• Use standard Salesforce Reports for tracking duplicates entering your system (if any) are essential to your business or not.
• With large volumes of data coming in your system, some duplicates are anyway bound to enter your database, one way or the other. Use a deduplication tool, this can really make your life easy by keeping your Salesforce org clean of duplicates.

Check out Dupicate Search and Merge “ The Perfect Duplicate management app for Salesforce. DSM solves all your data duplicity problems and can save you time and effort in keeping your org clean.
Keeping your Salesforce Org clean is not a one-man job or a one-time activity. It calls for a collective effort and is an ongoing process, you strive to keep your Database clean and perfect which eventually gives you returns in terms of smooth Operations and Profits.
All the best in keeping your Org. clean!!