Salesforce is an excellent help for many small and medium businesses. It allows sales teams to communicate and keep track of their progress in the work of bringing new customers on board. Nonetheless, like all similar programs, Salesforce leaves room for human error. This is how duplicate recordings can appear. It is enough for two members of a team to enter the details of the same person without performing a proper check of the database, and you are going to have two recordings which represent the same individual.
Luckily, finding duplicates and merging accounts in Salesforce is easy. This article is going to show you in a few steps how to keep your database accurate and always up-to-date.
Merging Accounts In Salesforce
The first thing to do when searching for duplicate contacts is to select an account and take a look at its associated list of contacts. If needed, you can click on All Contacts to see the full list.
You can merge up to three recordings, which you need to select prior to executing this command. One of them should be selected as Master Record. All information in its hidden fields is going to be transferred to the resulting contact, so be very careful when you choose this contact. Nonetheless, if you don’t want to keep all hidden fields, you can edit them and check only the ones you need to preserve. In order to be able to perform this selection, your user needs to have the “Edit Read Only Fields” permission.
If there’s any conflicting data in the fields that are going to be retained, those rows are going to be marked in purple. After you sort out all these issues, all you need to do is click Merge and the operation is going to be automatically completed.
When merging accounts in Salesforce, you need to be aware that all opportunity or case information associated with any of the original contacts will be transferred to the resulting recording. If both contacts have active Self-Service user names, you need to deactivate one of them prior to executing the merge, because this name is going to be adopted by the resulting contact.
If two contacts are members of different campaigns, all of them are going to be preserved by the merged record. If your organization uses divisions, the merged contact is going to be associated with the division of its account. The merged contact is also going to be included on all case teams of the original contacts, so no such information is going to be lost by mistake. This master contact is also going to be present in all meetings of the original contacts. However, you have to edit the event detail pages and add the new contact to the meeting invitee list.
It’s always useful to check and double-check all information associated with all duplicate contacts before merging accounts in Salesforce. This is how you can ensure the accuracy of your database and the smooth running of all sales and marketing operations of your business.