A large insurance provider is looking to implement Salesforce.

According to the Salesforce documentation2, duplicate leads are leads that have the same or similar information as other leads in Salesforce. Duplicate leads can cause poor customer experience, higher costs, and inaccurate reporting. To mitigate the issues caused by duplicate leads, some of the recommended practices are:

Standardize lead information across all channels (option B). This means using consistent formats, values, and fields for capturing lead data from different sources, such as web forms, email campaigns, or third-party vendors. This can help reduce data quality issues and make it easier to identify and prevent duplicate leads.

Implement a third-party solution to clean and enrich lead data (option D). This means using an external service or tool that can validate, correct, update, and enhance lead data before or after importing it into Salesforce. This can help improve data quality and accuracy, and reduce duplicate leads.

Implement a de-duplication strategy to prevent duplicate leads (option E). This means using Salesforce features or custom solutions that can detect and block duplicate leads from being created or imported into Salesforce. For example, using Data.com Duplicate Management3, which allows defining matching rules and duplicate rules for leads and other objects.

Building a process to manually search and merge duplicates (option A) is not a good practice, as it can be time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. Building a custom solution to identify and merge duplicate leads (option C) is also not a good practice, as it can be complex, costly, and difficult to maintain. It is better to use existing Salesforce features or third-party solutions that can handle duplicate leads more effectively.