Salesforce Duplicate Management: The Limitations that Prevent Effective Data Management

Data quantifies facts, making them more reliable and visionary. Data in-flow from different departments, sources, and follow-ups can turn into a hoard of bad data in the absence of a set process.

Deduping, by eliminating redundant data from the equation, minimizes downtime and keeps business continuity plans on track. It can also help manage relevant and reliable data in a timely and cost-effective manner.

In Salesforce, Duplicate Management is a standard solution for deduping. The solution consists of Matching Rules and Duplicate Rules which trigger two possible outcomes:

• Notifying the user about creating a duplicate
• Blocking the creation of a duplicate record

Duplicate Management, however, is not available for all orgs. There are other limitations of Salesforce’s default deduping solution that does little to no good to businesses that have extensively large and complex data.

The Limitations of Salesforce Duplicate Management

1. It Blocks Creation of New Records
If you create a duplicate by API or import, Salesforce wouldn’t send an alert for it because it only does so when a duplicate is inserted manually. This means that you will lose relevant data if you use other entry methods, for example, information stored in previously empty fields and campaign data.

2. It is Incompatible with Large Data Volumes
Running large batch jobs is quite tough with Salesforce’s standard dedupe solution. As per the Salesforce Trailblazer Community, “In an org with many records, duplicate jobs can fail”. Furthermore, you need to manually process all found duplicate pairs from a Salesforce batch job, which is extremely time-consuming when working with large amounts of data.

3. It has Limited Matching Algorithms
Salesforce Duplicate Management offers exact and fuzzy matching algorithms that are often incapable of finding duplicates on many occasions. It also lacks a weighting method in which a matching email address should count as heavier or have more weightage than a matching first name.

4. It Merges a Maximum of Three Records at a Time
If your dedupe job results in a list of duplicate groups that include groups of four or more duplicates of the same record, you cannot merge them with Salesforce Duplicate Management. It is because it allows you to merge a maximum of three records at a time which further slows down the processing time.

5. It Does Not Support Cross-Object Matching
There is a possibility that your new lead is already present in your Salesforce organization but as a Contact. This calls for a cross-object matching to ensure that you don’t work with duplicate data. But, Salesforce Duplicate Management, unfortunately, doesn’t support cross-object matching, which means jobs are limited to finding duplicates within objects only.
Another downside is that duplicate jobs do not compare and merge records on custom objects.

6. It Only Supports Manual Merging
Although Salesforce allows you to merge record groups in the list of duplicate groups, the only way to go about this is to open and review each duplicate group manually. Automatically merging all the groups on the list is not an option either which can be quite cumbersome.

In a nutshell, the Salesforce native duplicate management, although a cut above other CRMs, still misses the mark in terms of effective duplicate management. While it does the job, it still doesn’t completely solve the problem in a significant way.

Is there any other solution?

To help overcome the challenges of managing complex data in Salesforce and the limitations of the standard dedupe solution, Dupe Manager is the best bet. Equipped with data cleansing powers, it prevents your data from becoming messy and polluted with duplicates, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies.

By extending the capabilities of the standard Salesforce solution, it enables reliable, relevant, and high-quality Salesforce data. When immaculate deduping is on your mind, our Dupe Manager for Salesforce is the way to go.

Want to steer clear of bad data in Salesforce? Get Dupe Manager.