Salesforce How-to: Using Duplicate Management

Worried about potential duplicate records for Contacts, Accounts or even other objects in your Salesforce environment? One possible (and free!) tool that can help is the native duplicate management functionality in Salesforce. If you're at all concerned about duplicate records, we highly recommend spending an hour or so going through the documentation and setting up a rule or two. 

You can find everything you ever wanted to know about the included Duplicate Management feature including an overview of how it works and full instructions to set it up here. 

Considerations for using with Soapbox Engage:
There are two options for matching rules:

1. Block: prevents new records from being added if a potential duplicate is found
2. Alert: allows the record to be created but "flags" the potential duplicate by creating an Alert record that can be reported on so you can find, review and clean up the potential duplicates later

For use with Soapbox Engage, it is very important that you use the Alert option so records can still be created. If you opt to use the Block rule to prevent users from being able to create duplicate records through the main Salesforce user interface, make sure you exclude the Salesforce user account used for your integration. If you use a Block rule without excluding the connected user account, Engage will not be able to successfully create/convert records and it will give an error message.