On Duplicate Contacts in Salesforce

Duplicates in any database are an absolute pain but there are effective ways to clean dirty data. What I'm talking about here are forced duplicates, those ones the business has deemed proper to duplicate and work from two different business records for the same human being. I'll be honest, these piss me off. Having been a sole system administrator for a medium size Salesforce org for years, and now a developer on a large one, I deal with some of the laziest CRM users with some very sloppy habits and very few of them justified.

According to some businesses, forced duplicates are necessary at times. One particular company catered to the super-wealthy, both for business and personal use. This means that the CEO of XYZ company would likely buy a product for his business and for his family, two very different types of sales opportunities, same product. So how do you associate the same Contact record with two different types of Opportunities? Does the personal one belong in the same account as the corporate one? Well, the company's solution was to duplicate the person in two separate accounts and work him split down the middle like some kind of two headed dog being fed.

That's all well and good if you're only purpose is to sell someone something. But what if you have intentions of deploying the Service Cloud to handle customer care and retention? How easy will it be for your service reps to log cases for the same person split between two separate accounts? Your prospects and customers don't need two separate contact records any more than they need two pair of underwear to wear each day. Like Willy Wonka said, "Everyone has been given one and one is enough for everyone."

Here's one solution:

1. Have Salesforce turn on Person Accounts in your org and once you get them configured, move the CEO to his own person account from the Corporate one


2. Create a new lookup field to the Account object on the Account Object titled "Related Accounts" and make sure to add the Related Accounts Related List to your Account and Person Account Page Layouts


3. On the Person Account, enter the Corporate Account Name into the new lookup field "Related Accounts"


4. Go to the Corporate Account and look at that new Related Accounts section. You should see the CEO's Account linked to in this section

But does this solve the two types of opportunity same contact problem? Yes it does, because you can add any Contact as a Contact Role in any Opportunity, not just Contacts inside the Account the Opportunity is associated with. Solving your opportunity problems by duplicating and dirtying up your Account and Contact records is like splitting a fish down the middle and throwing each half in a separate lake, just so you can claim you caught a fish in both lakes. It's ridiculous and you companies doing it need to stop it.

Now, when your sales users identify a personal opportunity within the corporate one (or vice versa), they can establish this in your database so as not to duplicate records, obfuscate pipeline, confuse future service users or piss off your Admin who is trying to merge duplicate records together and no longer has to wade through your one off crap.

PHOTO: Duplicates © by flossyflotsam