Good data quality is essential for making informed business decisions and maintaining trust in your Salesforce system. Clean, accurate, and consistent data allows your team to work efficiently and provides valuable insights for growing your business. However, poor data can lead to confusion, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.
If you’re looking to improve the quality of your Salesforce data, follow these three quick tips to keep your records accurate and organised.
1. Identify and Fix Duplicate Records
Duplicate records can clutter your Salesforce org and create confusion when dealing with customers. Merging or removing duplicate records ensures your data remains clean and avoids miscommunication.
How to Identify Duplicates:
- Duplicate Rules and Matching Rules: Salesforce comes with built-in Duplicate Rules and Matching Rules to detect and manage duplicates. You can set these up to compare specific fields like email addresses, phone numbers, or company names to identify similar records.
- Manual Review: Periodically review records to identify potential duplicates that may not be caught by automated rules.
How to Fix Duplicates:
- Merge Records: When duplicates are identified, you can merge them to retain the most relevant data. Go to the record, click Find Duplicates, and merge the records.
- Duplicate Management Tools: Consider using AppExchange tools like Duplicate Check or Cloudingo to automate duplicate detection and merging.
Pro Tip: Set up a regular routine for reviewing duplicate reports to stay on top of potential data issues.
2. Use Required Fields and Validation Rules to Enforce Data Standards
Incomplete or incorrect data can harm your business operations. By setting required fields and validation rules, you can ensure that your team enters critical information correctly.
Required Fields:
- Mark important fields as required to ensure key information is captured during data entry. For example, fields like Email Address, Phone Number, or Account Type should be required to maintain complete records.
Validation Rules:
- Create Validation Rules to enforce data quality by setting conditions that data must meet before being saved.
- For example, a validation rule can ensure that a UK postcode follows the correct format or that a phone number contains the right number of digits.
Pro Tip: Regularly review your validation rules to ensure they align with your business processes and don’t slow down data entry.
3. Follow Best Practices for Data Importing
Importing data into Salesforce can be a powerful way to update records or add new information. However, improper data imports can lead to errors and duplicates. Following best practices helps ensure that imported data is clean and consistent.
Best Practices for Data Imports:
- Clean Data Before Importing: Use a tool like Excel to clean and standardise your data before importing. Remove duplicates, correct misspellings, and ensure consistency in formatting.
- Use Data Loader or Data Import Wizard: Depending on the volume of data, choose between Data Import Wizard (best for standard objects) or Data Loader (ideal for large data imports or custom objects).
- Map Fields Correctly: Always double-check your field mappings to ensure that data goes into the correct fields.
Pro Tip: Start with a small test import to verify data accuracy before importing large datasets.
Bonus Tips for Maintaining Clean Data
Regular Data Audits: Schedule regular audits to identify inconsistencies or missing information.
Leverage Automation: Use Salesforce Flows to automate data updates and reduce manual errors.
Educate Your Team: Train your users on data entry best practices to prevent errors from happening in the first place.
Keep Your Salesforce Data Clean with IntegraLogic
Maintaining high-quality data in Salesforce doesn’t have to be a challenge. By following these quick tips, you can ensure your records stay accurate and your team works with reliable information.
Need help optimising your Salesforce data processes? IntegraLogic can help you implement best practices and create customised automation to keep your data clean and consistent. Get in touch with us today!