USE CASE: Preventing Short or Vague Record Names in Salesforce

Problem: Creation of record names doesn’t follow uniform rules and results in confusion

Using consistent naming conventions has many benefits for the users of Salesforce. It helps to provide important context, to quickly recognize the categories a record may belong to, or to group them in a list by common values. Without proper guidelines, users may use record names without rhyme or reason, resulting in misunderstandings and lost productivity.

Solution: Automatically warn the Salesforce user to follow the properly accepted format for naming records

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 example of inconsistently naming records. 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 warning says: “The name of this Account has less than three characters. Are you sure this is the correct name for the Account?”

Most Accounts are expected to have names that are longer than two characters, but that is not the case for all Accounts and you don’t want to prevent the save of a valid Account (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. So it serves as a reminder to add the missing information later.

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!