While Salesforce comes with some built-in deduplication functionalities, they are very limited and do not fulfill the needs of most organizations. For example, you are only able to merge three records at a time, there is no support for custom objects, it does not perform well with large volumes of data and many other limitations. This is why you need a deduplication tool to help you bypass these restrictions and augment your data cleansing capabilities.  

A lot of the apps on the AppExchange are rule-based which presents certain usability problems. First of all, it takes time resources to create all of the rules and filters. Creating a new rule every time a duplicate is discovered is simply unsustainable and, ultimately, a futile effort when we think about all of the possible “fuzzy” duplicates. Then we need to think about the effort required to manage those rules to make sure they do not interfere with business processes. For example, some of the deduping rules can block web-to-lead submissions from coming in. Finally, the rule-based approach is not scalable. For example, let’s say that you have a modest number of records such as 100,000. You decide to upload a spreadsheet with 50,000 additional records. A rule-based system would need to perform 5,000,000,000 comparisons (100,000 X 50,000) to identify possible duplicates. Imagine the number of comparisons that would need to be made for organizations with hundreds of thousands or even millions of records. 

This is why DataGroomr uses machine learning for duplicate detection since it allows the user to avoid all of these issues and simplifies usability as well. There is no complicated setup process, no rules to manage and the machine learning takes a smarter approach to deduplication that is more scalable. More about this will be discussed in the next section. 

What separates machine learning from rule-based deduplication is that it recreates the human thought process. In other words, just like you would look at two records and label them as duplicates (or not) the same logic would be applied by machine learning. We train the machine learning algorithms through various string metrics that are able to calculate whether or not two field entries are the same. When the algorithms identify potentially duplicate records, it will present you with a side-by-side view of the master record and the suspected duplicate either inside DataGroomr or Salesforce. You will then be able to compare the field values in the master record with fields containing different values in the suspected duplicate record, which will be highlighted in red. 

Over time, as you label records as either unique or duplicates, the system will “learn” from your choices and apply the same logic to subsequent records. This is called Active Learning and it saves you the hassle of having to input the necessary weights for each field for every comparison. All of these techniques enable the machine learning to do the heavy lifting for you, which makes it a smarter approach to deduping Salesforce. 

Your data is never static. It is constantly being transmitted from one point to another; new data is created; existing data is adjusted, stored, and sometimes destroyed. Each of the actions that occur over the course of the data’s lifetime presents a potential threat to its quality. DataGroomr is continuously monitoring and improving the health of your data by providing you with: 

• An instant data quality assessment – As soon as you connect DataGroomr to your Salesforce, DataGroomr will run a data quality assessment that will tell you how many duplicates you have.
• Customizable deduplication algorithms – You will be able to customize the deduplication algorithms by adjusting the field weights, adding or modifying a threshold and other customized settings.
• Validating your data – People’s phone number, email address, mailing address and other contact information changes frequently. We will help you make sure you have the right information for your leads.
• Duplicate prevention – Unlike other deduplication apps on the AppExchange, we dedupe incoming imports before they get into your Salesforce.