Couple of years back salesforce did not have a proper duplicate record management method. There was manual duplicate record finder for Leads as below screenshot. You have to click on a button to find duplicate once the lead is created or you can search for the leads and merge them if there are any such duplicate records. The find duplicate button on lead pagelayout is shown in the below screenshot.
Some times we had to get an app exchange package to manage duplicates or sometimes we had to write thousand lines of codes to manage duplicates.
Now… couple of release before Salesforce has introduced Duplicate management. Which is a native feature and you don’t have to write code for this. This is at a basic level still and hope this is going to be much more advanced in near future and more robust. Here is how it works if you already do not know about this yet.
You can search in the quick search box in the setup menu for the word dup and you will see the below list. (Since Salesforce has given this box I have forgot which menu is which parent menu 🙂 just kidding)
First you have to create Matching Rules. Click on the New Rule button and you will see the list of objects you can enable this rule for. you can create matching rules for Standard objects (Account, Lead and Contact) and custom objects as well. For now I will give a demo on Lead record. So will select Lead and proceed.
On the next screen you will actually tell the system to consider specific fields for finding the duplicate leads in the system. I have selected First Name , Last Name and Phone number to be considered for this. This means whenever I am going to create a Lead in the system with the matching First Name,Last name and Phone number system will execute the duplicate logic. Note that you have an option to select fuzzy logic for phone fields. Will talk about fuzzy logic some time later in another post.
Now that you have created the matching rule click on Activate button to activate the rule. Note that we are not yet ready and at this point if you create a same lead system will not do anything on that.
Now click on Duplicate Rules link on the navigation bar and click on New Rule, Select Lead from the drop down. See the below screenshot , I have selected not to let the user create the Lead. But you can allow users to create a lead even if there is a matching lead in the system. It can be defined as per your need, whether you want users to create a duplicate or use the existing lead. Make sure you select the Matching Rule we created in the steps above and save it. Once saved , activate the rule so that system can start working on it.
Now some testing time…….
I have some leads created for testing with the same details. Lets open one of them and click on the Clone button for now , so that system will try to create a same new lead and see what happens in the end. Note the phone number and Firs + Last Name (= Test one).
Clicked on the clone and save button and bingo… I am not able to create a new one, instead system gives me reference of the existing lead which I can use.
Now I changed the last name to Two from one and I could save the record.
As a basic configuration we are done here 🙂 . This is a very basic configuration, but you can have more robust logic and configuration in your org and prevent duplicate records being created, without having to purchase a 3rd party package and configure it or writing codes.
There are some known limitations , which will be hopefully resolved later on.
Duplicate Management Limitations
- Duplicate management is available for accounts, contacts, leads, and custom objects. All other objects, including Opportunities and Person Accounts, are not currently supported.
- Duplicate rules don’t run when:
- Records are created using Quick Create.
- Leads are converted to accounts or contacts and your organization doesn’t have the “Use Apex Lead Convert” permission.
- Records are restored with the Undelete button.
- Records are added using Exchange Sync.
- Records are manually merged.
- Records are created by a Self-Service user and the rule includes conditions based on the User object.
- Sometimes, if duplicate rules are set for an alert to show when potential duplicates are found, users are always blocked from saving records and do not see a list of possible duplicates. This situation happens when:
- Records are added using the data import tools.
- A person account is converted to a business account (and the newly created business account matches existing business accounts).
- Records are added or edited using Salesforce APIs.
- Standard and custom matching rules that use fuzzy matching methods only support Latin characters, and, if you’re using international data, we recommend using the Exact matching method with your matching rules.
- If a field on an object is no longer available to your organization, it could cause matching rules with mappings to this field to be ignored and duplicate detection to be affected. Check all duplicate rule field mappings for an object if there is a change to the fields available to your organization. For example, the Clean Status field is only available to customers with a Data.comlicense. If your organization no longer has a Data.com license, this field is no longer available and matching rules with mappings to this field are ignored.
- The customizable alert text in duplicate rules isn’t supported by the Translation Workbench.
- If you’re saving multiple records at the same time and your duplicate rules are set to Block or Alert, records within the same save aren’t compared to each other; they are only compared with records already in Salesforce. This behavior doesn’t affect theReport action, and duplicate record sets include records that match other records in the same save.
Hope this helps and gives some idea to those who did not know about this.
Leave comments or queries on this topic if you like.
Keep reading and sharing……
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