In addition to the prebuilt standard rules, users can create custom matching rules and duplicate rules in Salesforce to improve data quality according to their business requirements.
Let us try out an example to create a custom matching rule for the Contact object which compares the email field of a new contact with an existing contact to identify duplicates.
- Go to Setup-Matching Rules
- Click New in Matching Rules.
- Select ‘Contact’ from the ‘Object’ picklist.
- Type in the rule details in the ‘Rule name’ and ‘Description’ boxes (Unique name of the Rule will be automatically gets populated.
- Set the Criteria for matching in the ‘Rule Criteria’ section.
- Here the ‘Email’ field will be treated as a match if the value given is the same as in a previous record.
- Matching method for First name is given as ‘Fuzzy: first name’ which means it is not necessary for the first names in both records to be exactly same. For instance, the names Margaret Chan and Maggie Chan will be treated as matches.
Click Save and Activate the rule.
Now Go to Setup- Type Duplicate Rules in the Quick find box-Select Duplicate Rules.
- Give the Rule details.
- In Record level security, specify how your organization’s sharing rules determine which records the matching rule compares.
- Enforce sharing rules: The matching rule compares only records that the user has access to, and the resulting list of possible duplicates includes only records the user has access to.
- Bypass sharing rules: The matching rule compares all records, regardless of user access, but the resulting list of possible duplicates includes only records the user has access to.
- In Actions, specify the action to be taken when a user tries to save a potential duplicate record.
- Select the matching rule to identify the duplicate records.
Save and activate the rule.
Click Duplicate Rules (salesforce.com) to learn more about duplicate rules.
To easily manage the duplicate records created in the org, create a new report of the report type ‘Duplicate Contact Creation’ we created earlier. Refer Duplicate Management in Salesforce – Mortgage Banking Technology | Origination Strategy Consulting (takefiveconsulting.com)
- Add required fields and filters.
- Save and Run the report.
Click any duplicate record item. From the Details section, we can see the associated duplicate rule.
Click the Duplicate record set name. In the ‘Related’ section we can view the duplicate contacts under that record set.
Now you can go to the records and merge them to retain a single record thus improving data quality, without losing necessary information.
You can even subscribe to the report on a daily, weekly or monthly basis so that you can delete duplicate records periodically to maintain your data super clean.
Take Five Consulting is a technology company, based in Virginia U.S., that specializes in the Mortgage Banking vertical especially LOS implementation and application development. Take Five Consulting creates and implement mortgage technology and software specifically for Mortgage Industry.
