How to Remove Duplicate Contacts in Salesforce CRM?
If you want solutions to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce, you’ve arrived at the right webpage. Salesforce is a software company specializing in cloud computing, providing its clients with tools centered on Customer Relationship Management, customer service, and e-commerce to maximize their reach to current and future customers. If you are a business owner or marketing manager, you must be experiencing a problem with your Salesforce account – contact duplication.
We will discuss the problems and best way to delete duplicate contacts in Salesforce account, so keep reading this blog!
Problems Leading to Duplicated Contacts in Salesforce
There are many problems leading to duplicated contacts in your company’s Salesforce account, and some of these are:
- The first reason for the duplicacy issue is the manual errors in data entry. It can mean entering a contact more than once and repeated data entry by multiple account users.
- When you enter a contact in your company’s Salesforce account, many factors hamper that person’s profile. The factors include new work titles, separate work locations, and using personal and work email addresses in different situations. All these factors lead to the contact duplicacy problem and prompt you to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce.
- When a Salesforce account has contact records with the same name but separate variations, it leads to contact duplication. Suppose your account has a contact by the name of Chris Ramsey, and other variations get listed as Christopher Ramsey, C Ramsay, and the like – leading to contact repetition.
Whatever the reason for duplication is, your company may experience economic losses and image damage. Hence, it becomes necessary to remove duplicate contacts from Salesforce.
Read Similar: 2 Best Ways to Remove Duplicate Contacts in Yahoo Mail
Manual Way to Remove Duplicate Contacts from Salesforce
As discussed above, contacts with the same names but having variations lead to duplication. But you can’t delete them since every name variation differs in other details like contact number and email address, and individually deleting them becomes a tiring process. Hence, we can merge duplicate contacts in Salesforce with similar contact details. One thing to remember is that you can combine only three Salesforce duplicate contacts at once.
Follow these steps to remove duplicate contacts from your Salesforce account:
- Open the Salesforce website and enter your account credentials to log in.
- Open your account’s Contacts page and select a name you wish to deduplicate.
- Click View Duplicates and select the duplicated contacts and click Next.
- Select a contact as the Master Record and choose the data you want to merge from other records.
- Click Next and merge all Salesforce duplicate contacts by clicking Merge.
- Open the Master Record to access all combined data.
If your account has many duplicate contacts, use these steps to merge duplicate contacts in Salesforce till your account is free of duplicacy in contact records. This method is beneficial only when your account has limited duplicated records. An automated tool becomes the best choice to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce.
Best Way to Delete Duplicate Contacts in Salesforce
We will discuss the automated solution in three phases – the first phase involves exporting the account contacts, the second phase sees the use of the automated tool, and the last one requires uploading the deduplicated contacts list to your Salesforce account.
#1 Phase: Export Salesforce Account Contacts
The first phase of the professional solution involves exporting all account contacts (or your customer details) from your Salesforce account. The following steps will help you download your account contacts to your computer:
- Go to the Reports tab on your account dashboard and select New Report.
- Select Accounts and Contacts and click Continue.
- Filter the data according to your preferences and select Run to run the report.
- Click the triangle icon next to Edit and choose Export after the report processing gets over.
- Select Details Only to export your contacts in XLSX or CSV format, excluding the filter settings and headers.
- Click Export to export your account contacts to your computer.
#2 Phase: Use an Automated Tool
The next phase involves using an automated tool to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce. This is the best way to delete duplicate contacts in Salesforce CSV file while ensuring data integrity. The name of the tool is the 4n6 CSV Duplicate Remover Tool.
Some of its features are:
- Multiple filters to deduplicate contacts in Salesforce CSV format: Match Pattern, Case Sensitive, etc.
- The tool identifies and removes duplicate Salesforce contacts precisely, ensuring only original contacts remain in the CSV file.
- Compatible with Windows versions 11, 10, 8.1, and others.
Follow these steps to remove duplicate contacts from Salesforce file:
- Download and run the tool on your Windows computer.
- Select the Open dropdown menu and add the Salesforce CSV file by clicking the Choose Files or Choose Folders option.
- The tool will add the file on the left panel. Click it to view your Salesforce account contacts.
- Select the criteria to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce file.
- Go to the Actions menu and click on Remove Duplicate Records.
- Confirm the deduplication criteria under Salesforce CSV Options and click Browse to select the location for the deduplicated file.
- Begin the Salesforce contacts deduplication by clicking Save. The tool deduplicates the Salesforce contacts in no time.
- Open the selected folder by clicking Open Folder to access the deduplicated Salesforce contact’s file.
#3 Phase: Import Deduplicated Contacts File to Salesforce
The last phase involves importing deduplicated contacts file to your Salesforce account. The following steps describe the process for importing the deduplicated contacts file using its Import Wizard:
- Enter your Salesforce account credentials and click Setup in the Gear icon.
- Use the Quick Find box to type Import and select Data Import Wizard under Integrations.
- Click the Launch Wizard! Box and choose Accounts and Contacts under Standard Objects.
- Click Add New Records and drag the contacts file or add it to the wizard by clicking the CSV option.
- Click Next, review the file mapping status, and again select Next to move ahead.
- Now click Start Import to start the CSV file import. Click OK to view the import status on the Bulk Data Load Jobs page. The page will show you the process status of file importing.
- Go to the Accounts tab and select the New this Week list view to see deduplicated contacts in your Salesforce account.
Conclusion
This blog discussed the reasons and solutions to remove duplicate contacts in Salesforce. You can only merge duplicate contacts in Salesforce in the name of manual deduplication since deleting them becomes time-consuming. Hence, the three-phased professional solution becomes the best way to delete duplicate contacts in Salesforce account.
