USE CASE: Finding and Fixing Duplicate Cases in Salesforce

Share

Free Salesforce business guides to help admins/developers, project managers, sales managers, and decision makers. Download the free PDF series now: Reinventing Your Business, Reimagining Your Salesforce®.

Problem: Users need to identify duplicate Cases and reconcile the data

Cases are important drivers of activity and repositories of information and progress within a business. Cases are usually prioritized and assigned, their ages are measured for closure and productivity, and their satisfaction and escalation rates are monitored. The goal is to close Cases, learn from the experience, and prepare for the inevitable new Cases to come.

Duplicate cases can interrupt these processes, posing a threat to efficiency, productivity, internal morale, and customer satisfaction. It is important to have one consolidated record for every case, in order to drive the right actions. However, users might not know about the duplicates until some time has passed and activities are already underway.

Solution: Automatically notify users of the duplicate Cases and empower them to correct the situation

One sign of potentially duplicate Cases is records with a similar subject, same Account, and same Created Date. This can be difficult to discover manually, without being directly notified of it when a record is viewed, created, or modified.

Using the Free Edition of the Data Quality Helper app, an Admin can easily set a similarity percentage threshold that will detect records with similar field values for specified fields, which then displays an alert on the record with the potential duplicates. In response, users can quickly review the potential duplicates’ details. If users determine action is needed, they can use the app’s functionality to merge the information from the duplicates into one corrected record.

Salesforce default functionality doesn’t allow flexible duplicate detection and customized resolution—no adjustable duplicate sensitivity settings are available, not all objects are assessed, and the merging of data on duplicate records is limited. With the added functionality of Data Quality Helper, Admins have more flexibility to design unique duplication rules that better serve organization goals across a number of situations, beyond this duplicate Cases example. (Check out the Data Quality Helper Admin Guide for step-by-step instructions on how to set up duplication rules.)

Detecting duplicate Cases

This alert says: “Potential Duplicates Found. If the list below contains duplicate records, select all of the records to merge, then click the ‘Next’ button. Otherwise, click the ‘Save Without Merge’ button below to save the Case, or ‘Back’ to make additional modifications.”

In this particular example, the rule is looking for duplicate records on the Case object using the Subject, Account, and Created Date fields. Here, two Cases are listed as potential duplicates.

  • If any of the records in the list of potential duplicates are identified as non-duplicates, simply click the dropdown menu in the Action column and click the ‘Mark As Non-Duplicate’ menu item, or click the ‘View Record’ menu item if more information is needed about the record.
  • Once the duplicate records have been identified, select them before clicking ‘Next,’ which will start the merging process where a user can select the fields that require updates.

Ideally, you want to streamline duplicates and consolidate information into one record. However, in some situations, a user may want to mark records that look similar as non-duplicates, or maybe they would like to manually adjust field values during the merge of duplicate records (unlike with default Salesforce’s less flexible duplicate resolution functionality). The merge choices should belong to Admins, users, and the organization—not to the Salesforce platform.

The good news is that, with Data Quality Helper, unresolved duplicate issues are easy to find at any time using the ‘Data Quality Helper Issues’ home page component. The component may be used as a reminder to find and merge duplicate records when users have availability.

Besides duplicate data detection and resolution, this app also offers enhanced data validation that exceeds default Salesforce functionality. Plus, the home page component also shows all unresolved validation issues detected by the rules Admins created. Install the free version today!

Schedule Demo/Consult

Install Free App Now

USE CASE: Ensuring Billing Info Is Included for Accounts in Salesforce Data Quality Helper Use Case Library USE CASE: Ensuring Contact Information Is Gathered in Salesforce
Chat Offline
Contact Us Here