Hello colleagues!
I am writing regarding an extra data hygiene project that I would like to have my team tackle in down-time. We are pretty stellar in terms of recording and tracking dupes as patrons call or email in - setting up daily merges. However, there are those decently large chunks of folks who only do business on-line and have two, three, and four accounts.
What are the best ways that you have found to search for, update, and manage these culprits?
Many thanks in advance (and apologies if this has been posted about recently, my search did not aggregate any results)
Best,
Marissa
We've decided to make it a rule here that email addresses are not allowed to be duplicated across different constituent numbers, including inactive eaddresses. If the two customer records are not dupes, the eaddress must be removed from one of them. I find this to be a good rule because the criteria is simple (just exact match on eaddress), it catches a huge percentage of duplicate accounts being created, and it is easy to maintain proactively.
We enforce this through two methods: first, we have customized the "find potential duplicates" procedure that populates the merge duplicates screen to work based on this criteria, and second, we have a DAILY report set up that complains to the Audience & Member Services Manager whenever it finds duplicate emails in the system. Populating the merge dupes screen alone isn't enough, because this won't catch emails duplicated between constituents of different types, say, household and individual. The report does. The other nice feature of this is that the report will only get sent to the manager when it has issues to report. So if the data is already clean, no annoying report! Like you, we have the merge customer procedure set to run nightly, so dupes that are confirmed and scheduled get cleaned up quickly. There's also a process that runs post-merge that dedupes identical email addresses that are already on the same constituent record, so that the merge keep cust doesn't end up with multiple identical emails.
When we started doing this, we had over a thousand dupe emails to resolve, but now it's down to just 2-3 per day, usually — more if we have a big onsale. A lot of them tend to be custs whose accounts were created over the phone or an email request, but don't create an online account until later. I know some other orgs have approached this problem by proactively creating web logins for every eaddress in the system so that the cust is forced to do a password reset instead of creating a new account, but we decided this was too error-prone and not a great customer experience.
Thank you!