Duplicate customers can scatter records of orders, contacts, and communications, but simply deduplicating by company name is equally dangerous. Group subsidiaries, eponymous companies or branches may have independent businesses.

First clarify the problem and conditions

Use multiple fields to prompt candidate duplicates, and merge them after manual verification; clarify the master record, reserved fields and conflict handling, record the source and provide a way to undo it.

Put rules into actual processes

For example, contacts in different departments of the same company can share customer entities, and two independent purchasing entities should be managed separately based on business relationships even if they have similar names.

Check with specific scenarios

Test the ownership of the person in charge, business opportunities and attachments after the merger, and confirm that the permissions have not been expanded; the association must be able to be restored when revoking, to avoid restoring only the customer name and leaving mixed records.

Check the processing results one by one

  • The candidate duplication list can display the name, unified business identification and existing contact information, but it is not necessary to disclose sensitive fields to all users.
  • Resolve owner conflicts and open opportunities before merging to ensure both parties know what will happen to records.
  • If a customer record is maintained by multiple people, the field selection should indicate the basis for acceptance. It cannot be assumed that the most recently edited party is always correct.
  • Recording the source number helps avoid the same duplicate items in the next import.
  • The undo plan should be practiced before the first official merger, including the restoration of associated orders and attachments, not just adding a button.
  • For entities that are related but cannot be merged, a relationship description can be established to allow business personnel to understand why the two records still exist.

How to review before and after going online

For batch deduplication, first verify the accuracy of candidates in a small area, and then process them step by step. When misassociation occurs, suspend similar rules first, confirm the impact record and recovery plan, and do not continue to merge more customers to cover up the discovered problems.