The deduplication of Accounts is not an exact science. It will require multiple passes of the deduplication wizard to clean out the various types of duplicates. Below we have listed a sample methodology for removing Account dupes in a multi-stage process:
- Edit your "Account name Text Remove/Replace List" and add in replacements and suffixes specific to your industry. If you have many government account you may want to have "Dept of " replaced with a blank or if you have many schools in your account list you may want to add "High School" "Primary School" to your suffix removal list.
- Run your first deduplication on a very specific criteria that will produce known duplicates. For example, if you used Account Name, Billing City, Account Phone, and Custom (Billing Street) you would generate a list of duplicates that you will be close to 100% sure are true dupes. You may even want to automatically de-dupe these account specifying that the ones with the greatest # of Contacts and Opportunities become the master account.
- Run your next few deduplications on gradually reduced criteria. You will need to pay more attention to the names of the account that are found and you will definitely want to "Double-Click" on the account names to see a detailed view of the account. Use a "Fuzzy" match last as it will require you to preview all potential duplicates.
You may find that you will receive multiple account names that vary across cities (i.e. IBM in New York and IBM in Boston). In these cases you may want to ensure that the Account site is set to "New York" or "Boston". To do this simply run the first stage of the wizard and do not check "billing city" but do check the custom field "Account Site" This will produce common names across cities. You can then export the found duplicates to a CSV file and then edit this file in excel to find the locations where the Account names are common for different cities and blank Account sites. You can then use the MassEffect tool to update the site names for the Account.
