Duplicate records: preventing and removing them

Duplicate records can be a major challenge for companies that rely on customer data to drive their sales and marketing efforts. Not only can duplicates lead to wasted time and resources, they can also lead to inaccurate data, which can distort the data. Fortunately, Salesforce provides capabilities to manage duplicates. In this article, we explain what duplicate records are and how we help companies keep their data set clean and improve their overall CRM efforts.

What is a duplicate record?

A duplicate record is a variation of an already existing record. It is important to avoid duplicate records because it can cause confusion. One of the features of a CRM system such as Salesforce is that all information is accessible and up-to-date in a central location. It acts as a "single source of truth." This also applies to a record. An account is an example of a record where you want to find all of a company's information. When a company's information is processed on two different accounts, there is no longer one account that contains all the information. This makes it easier to overlook things and gives the dataset a distorted picture of, for example, the number of unique accounts.

Matching rules and duplicate rules

Salesforce has methods to detect and prevent duplicate records. Matching rules are used to detect duplicate records. They work by comparing the values of specific fields on two or more records. You can break these settings down again into criteria for exact matches or similar matches.

Matching rules are thus useful for finding duplicate records, but also for preventing them. In fact, they are part of "duplicate rules. Duplicate rules are used to prevent the creation of a duplicate record. This way, you ensure data quality by preventing errors and inconsistencies in the dataset.

When matching rules and duplicate rules are not set up properly, it can cause automatic actions to not be performed correctly. Consider a web-to-lead form where the information from the completed form is automatically sent to Salesforce. If a match is found, the duplicate rule prevents a record from being created, but with this, the information from the completed form will also be lost. So you miss the opportunity to enrich data and maybe even a potential lead!

Prevent and remove duplicate records

Addressing duplicate records can be done in two ways: prevent and cure. To prevent duplicate records, it is important to establish the correct criteria for a duplicate. This varies by organization and determines how matching rules and duplicate rules should be set.

To remove existing duplicate records, there are options within Salesforce and third-party tooling. For example, you can use the "Data Loader" and the default object "DuplicateRecordSet. This makes it possible to export records to a .CSV file and then indicate in the Data loader which records should be deleted. It is important to note, however, that this standard object also uses matching rules to identify duplicate records.

Advice from our consultants

In any case, we recommend paying attention to preventing duplicate records. Duplicate management is important in order to process data correctly in the Salesforce environment and avoid confusion. Therefore, determine in advance what should be marked as duplicate and with what criteria, through automations, records are created.