Not the droids you're looking for: trouble with duplicates

Duplicates in your CRM are usually a minor annoyance, but sometimes they can be downright debilitating.

A client of mine finally reached out last week about significant headaches from duplicates:

• The dupes added hours per week to her workload — frustrating!

• Reports on important topics were never accurate — disappointing!

• She had resorted to tracking accurate data in a spreadsheet — what the heck?!

• Even worse: With all this extra work she felt so pressed for time that actually finding and merging the duplicates seemed like an impossible task — so it just kept growing!

So, what's going on here?

Her site provides memberships to organizations, which are inherited by the organization's employees. Those employees then get access to members-only content under WordPress.

Problem is, there were hundreds of duplicate organizations — and while one of them (let's say "ACME Droids 1") might have a valid membership, the duplicate ("ACME Droids 2") had none.

As a result:

• Logged-in users who are actually employees of ACME Droids (but only had a relationship to the non-member "ACME Droids 2") were being blocked from members-only content.

• Member organizations were getting requests for payment on unpaid dues when they were already paid up — embarassing!

• Because the organization names both say “ACME Droids”, staff often didn’t realize they were looking at the wrong one, and had no idea where these problems were coming from.

After she reached out for help, we were able to analyze the situation and come up with a good solution for her.

CiviCRM is now cleaning up most of the duplicates automatically, and proactively alerting her of new potential duplicates that need her attention to merge.

No more membership headaches, embarassing miscalculations, extra work, or incorrect user access rejections.

Here's the thing:

No matter what CRM you're running, you're going to have duplicate records. As your data policies increase in complexity and nuance, those duplicates can start to cause surprising problems.

Cleaning up duplicate records is like flossing your data. It's probably not fun, but neglecting it can lead to growing pain over time.

Stay on top of it if you can. And if you get into a bind, get some help.

It's not an impossible problem, and you can create healthy and painless routines to deal with it.

All the best,
A.