Manage Duplicate Leads – Dynamics 365 for Sales

A new capability has been recently added to the platform about duplication detection for the lead data. Interestingly this only comes for the leads, not for any other table or entity in the application. One reason is it is very important to recognize duplicate leads so that you do not end up targeting the same customer again and again and the other is that it is much easier to recognize equality for union or report as you have data that is verified in most of the cases, unlike guide which could have varying sources.

To enable this specification, open the Dynamics CRM for Sales app, navigate to App Settings, Duplication Detection (Data Improvement), and Turn on the Enable rules toggle option.

As you can notice that the specification is still in preview, so it is recommended to be used in trial environments to understand the specification and capabilities, and to assess it till it reaches GA i.e. common accessibility.

In case of this latest identical observation specification, duplicate leads are optimized based on the below rules

• Same email address
• Same phone number
• Similar name and company name i.e. Cathan Cook from Contoso or Cathan Cook from Contoso inc.
• Similar name and the same email domain i.e. Cathan Cook and Cathan@alpineskihouse.com or Cathan Cook and Admin@alpineskihouse.com

Now when you open one of the show data which could fall under the above rules, we can see a message being displayed for possible duplicates.

“2 possible duplicate records found” with the option “View possible duplicates”

Clicking on View likely copy opens the duplicate page record down the duplicate record(s) setup.

It peak the field on which the duplicate is applied, email address in this case.

You now have the choice to select and delete either similar data using the Delete choice on the page. Here on the left side is the guide you initially picked to view the duplicates suffixed with (current)

The remove options will remove the duplicate record from the page, you can use it to remove in case multiple duplicate records are found and you want to remove a few of them so that you can compare the relevant records.

You can also open the Duplicate page using the View duplicates command from the leads grid page.

Similar to the Delete and Remove option, you and also use the Merge option to merge the duplicate records into one. With the existing exact detection feature in the platform, you can only merge one duplicate record with the primary record. However with this new feature introduced specifically for Dynamics 365 for Sales, you can merge 4 duplicate records.

Thus we covered the key capabilities added in the new duplicate detection feature added in Dynamics 365 for sales, making the sales users more effective in their day-to-day activities. As said earlier the feature is still in preview, so keep checking about it, explore it and plan to use it once it reaches general availability.

You may also want to read,

• Advanced CRM tools to push your retail customer experience to the top
• Benefits of Sales Automation through CRM