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DeDupe Tools
Posted: 03 May 06 8:52 PM
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fiogf49gjkf0d are there any free deDupe tools out there? (Other than the SLX built in deDupe)
Gregor Anton
www.antonsolutions.com
CRM Solutions That Fit! |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 04 May 06 6:10 AM
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prednisolon og alkohol prednisolon og alkohol redirect fiogf49gjkf0d At what point are you looking to de-dupe? From within SLX or before the data is entered into SLX?
If you are using 6.2, there is some user education needed to be given to end users about using the "Look for matching records" when entering an new contact/account.
I've found that any kind of 'hand-off', bulk de-dupe, etc.. whatever you want to call it, isn't always perfect. In fact, many time the results are less than desirable when your phone starts ringing off the hook with questions about "Where did MY account/contact go?", etc. We basically put a process in place here where if a user finds a duplicate contact or account they assign the 'Dupe Contact' or 'Dupe Account' process that marks the account or contact as a duplicate and creates a to-do activity that is assigned to the admin. The admin in turn de-dupes the account/contact.
This keeps the users happy (most important) and the sanity level of the admin managable.  |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 04 May 06 8:26 AM
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fiogf49gjkf0d most accounts are generated by leads or via a web form, and are being deduped there, the problem is that a previous data import has caused a high number of duplicates that are already in the system.
What we'd want this dedupe tool to do is identify all duplicates in the database based on set criteria, then have the ability to merge them all together to the leading record, similar to the out of the box deduper. The leading record we could predefine as "with most history" or "with last history" etc.
Scan for dedupes would give us:
For Accounts:
Anton Solutions Inc. 403-451-1333
Anton Solutions Inc. 403-234-8948
Anton Solutions Inc. 403-451-1333
SageCRM 800-555-1234
SageCRM 800-123-4575
For Contacts same as above but at the contact level including contact name etc.
We're giving the out of the box deduper a try but have had mixed reviews about its accuracy and effectiveness.
Gregor Anton
www.antonsolutions.com
CRM Solutions That Fit! |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 05 May 06 6:24 AM
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fiogf49gjkf0d Gregor,
In my experience I've not found any automated dedupe tool that can honestly dedupe records and NOT cause some issue with someone somewhere. It might be able to do 90% of the job. But the other 10% is going to cause alot of headaches at the user level.
Reason I say this is because we had a very similar situation here. After doing alot of imports initially via marketing lists, etc.. alot of dupes started appearing. And over time reps would work different versions of the accounts. Sometimes more than one rep. But as can be expected , when you start merging accounts automatically serveral accounts would get merged and then users would start complaining, etc..
More or less, you have to be cautious about automated de-duping and understand it will never be 100%.
John G. |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 05 May 06 2:52 PM
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fiogf49gjkf0d I'll agree there that there really isn't a way to define criteria that'll work in this instance. Your best bet would be to roll your own but instead of automatically merging, have someone assigned to make sure this merge is correct. You could have this person use the internal tool since it produces roughly what you're looking for (if the user knows what they're doing that is).
The reason I say this is because subscription plays a HUGE part of this. If you have a remote that is subscribed to account A that is a dupe of account B but is not subscribed to the dupe, their knowledge of that account goes bye-bye. This is compounded by the fact that it's a bit of work to do any of this stuff outside of the normal methods. For instance you'd think you could just link a new contact to an existing accountid (update contact set accountid) but if you didn't use the Move Contact function all sorts of hell broke loose.
You're also faced with people using First, 1st, abreviations vs. full spelling, and a couple of other "duplicate but not exactly" type of problems that not every tool has mastered. Some use SoundEx which has a pretty good success rate but it's not always reliable. You can check individual fields and have a "percentage of being a dupe" system where if 50% of the import matches a current record, ask a designated person if they will allow the dupe. Then you get to blame someone else for the reason the database is polluted  . |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 08 May 06 6:39 AM
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fiogf49gjkf0d Jeremy,
The reasons you listed (like the remote one that I totally forgot about) are the reasons we have contact processes that users assign to contacts at the account or contact level. Simply, they are called "Dupe Contact" and "Dupe Account" contact processes. When ever a user runs across a dupe contact or account they assign one of these contact processes. It in turn assigns an activity for the admin to de-dupe that contact/account.
Has been working so far, and if someone complains about there being dupes, we just point them to the processes in place.
John G. |
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Re: DeDupe Tools
Posted: 16 May 06 5:07 AM
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fiogf49gjkf0d Thank You for all the replies. We were able to derive some simple yet effective scripts that identified records to match various dupe criteria. Based on those we created group and used the out of the box deduper, along with some additional scripts to tweak it a little. So far so good.
I agree that most tools out there aren't perfect, not only that but they are expensive and also too complex (even for their own employees).
Gregor Anton
www.antonsolutions.com
CRM Solutions That Fit |
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