USE CASE: Ensuring Contact Information Is Gathered in Salesforce

Problem: Contact or Account records are missing how-to-contact information

Records with incomplete data can damage prospect nurturing or customer relationship management. Missing data can take many forms and have different implications. However, without email addresses, phone numbers, or physical addresses, it’s hard to reach contacts to respond to situations in a timely and effective fashion.

Solution: Automatically warn the Salesforce user when the incomplete record is being created or edited

Using the Free Edition of the Data Quality Helper app, an Admin can easily create hard or soft validation rules to address various situations and inform users of the required or desired elements.

Salesforce default functionality only allows hard validation rules—if records are not properly created/updated, the save/submit is prevented. With the added functionality of Data Quality Helper, Admins have more flexibility to design unique validation rules that better serve organization goals across a number of situations, beyond this missing contact information example. In addition, Admins can craft warning messages, customized by content and formatting. Finally, the app can provide a list view of all new and existing records with unresolved data validation issues—making future data cleanup easier. (Check out the Data Quality Helper Admin Guide for step-by-step instructions on how to set up validation rules.)

In this particular use case, the Admin has chosen to use a soft validation rule and customized warning empowering the Salesforce user to make a decision on how to proceed.

This alert says: “When saving a Contact, please enter in a phone number or email address that may be used when attempting to reach them. If you were unable to collect contact information, you may continue with the save.”

Ideally, you want all the information you can get, but in some cases not having it may not be worth the cost of preventing the creation or update of the Contact record altogether (like with Salesforce’s default hard validation). The choice whether to use this app’s soft or hard validation is an Admin and organizational decision.

The good news is that, with Data Quality Helper, unresolved validation issues remain attached to the record. They aren’t one-time-only and just disappear. This way, it serves as a reminder to add the missing information later when that information is available.

Besides enhanced data validation, this app also offers duplicate data detection and resolution that exceeds default Salesforce functionality. Plus, don’t forget to take advantage of the list view that shows all validation and duplication issues detected by the rules Admins created. Install the free version today!