Are you finding too many duplicate leads, contacts or accounts in your Microsoft Dynamics CRM system? Or are the duplicate detection rules finding too many false positives? Maybe a bunch of other duplicates are not being found at all?
This is a common issue we hear from people using Dynamics CRM.
When you look in CRM, you may see that the duplicate detection is turned on, and even running regular jobs. The database or Dynamics CRM Administrator may be looking through the flagged duplicates only to find that there are many false positives, which makes data cleanup very difficult and time consuming.
Don’t worry, there are some things that can be done to setup Microsoft Dynamics CRM to catch those duplicates slipping through the cracks.This will not help improve your data quality, but save you time and lots of needless frustration.
Dynamics CRM comes with a handful of default duplicate detection rules. On the surface it seems like these rules would catch a lot (if not all) duplicate situations.
But, these rules are not all they are appear to be.
Let’s take a closer look.
Default: Accounts with the same Account Name
The title alone implies it would catch all the duplicate accounts. However, upon closer inspection of the rule, there are a number of issues.
Let’s talk about three.
- When two records are merged together, there are still two records in the system. One remains active, and another is now inactive. By not checking the “Exclude inactive matching records” box [1], every time the rules are ran, those same to merged records will pop up as a duplicate. This makes a lot of false positives. Check off the box to avoid this.
- Exact match works only when people entering the data do the same thing as everyone else. The below are two account names for the same account. They are not an exact match so they would not be caught by the rule. Suffixes like Inc, LLC, and Co can be done many different ways, and staff will find each way.
- Machine Shop, LLC.
- Machine Shop llc
- Machine Shop
To fix this, change the exact match criteria [2] to “Same First Characters” and pick something long like 15 or 20. This will help cut down on the number of missed records, but still can produce some false positives.
- Ignoring blank values [3] does not have a lot of value on an account name rule, but if you were trying to search for duplicate websites, not checking this box would make every account without a website flag as a duplicate. Checking this box avoids that.
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