How EF Education First Tackled High-Volume Duplicates in Salesforce

About EF Education First

EF Education First is a global education company running language, academic, cultural exchange, and educational travel programs. EF employs close to 52,000 staff, faculty, and teachers, working out of more than 600 offices and schools across 52 countries, with a presence in 116 countries overall. The company has run these programs for 55 years and works to stay agile and small in culture even as it grows.

The high-volume duplicate challenge

EF Language generates leads at a scale that outpaces manual handling: tens of thousands of new records a week, sometimes in a single day. Most arrive through online channels, web forms, and various fairs and competitions.

When agents follow up on those leads, they need a single, coherent view of each customer. Without one, they waste time chasing leads a colleague has already handled. EF also mails brochures, and sending the same brochure twice to one person wastes money and paper.

EF is moving from self-built software to packaged software, and the biggest step in that shift is migrating from a self-built CRM to Salesforce. Because EF's web properties have no account system, many of the new records arriving are duplicates of people already in the database. Before adopting Plauti, EF used a self-built deduplication tool, and a team still merged by hand any pair that looked like a probable but not certain match.

EF also splits its commercial activity into separate markets, so a duplicate had to be caught within a single market, never across markets, and EF wanted to keep control of the automatic merge logic itself.

The challenge had two parts. First, EF needed to dedupe enormous volumes of data automatically, as records entered the system. Second, the thousands of EF agents doing this work day to day needed a fast, responsive tool built natively for Salesforce.

The solution: automated matching with market-level control

Plauti dedupes every newly inserted record automatically. Salesforce's own processing power isn't enough to clear peak loads in minutes — when an influencer promotes EF on social media, thousands of leads land at once. Plauti's Direct Processing is configured so the most important leads are processed first.

EF uses Apex plugins to apply its own merge logic during that automatic processing. Plauti matches only within a single EF market: an object filter flags a pair as duplicates only when they share the same value in a specified field, for example the value 'US' in the market field.

Every EF agent responsible for following up on leads uses Plauti's Live Lightning component, which sits on the record page and warns them about possible duplicates. When an agent confirms a pair is a duplicate, they merge it with Plauti's merge feature. Based on feedback from EF, Plauti also built an 'Overall Job Results' view that lists every duplicate found across all jobs in one place.

A single view of every customer

With Plauti in place, thousands of new leads are processed automatically every day, and EF merges a double-digit percentage of those leads as duplicates. Where a human check is needed, EF's admin team works through the remaining candidates with fast, intuitive merge options. To make sure nothing slips through, EF agents also rely on live duplicate alerts at the point of entry and on the record page itself.

Matching only within a market, never across markets, fits EF's business requirements exactly. Because Plauti is a 100% native Salesforce application, EF staff picked it up with very little training.

EF saves thousands of dollars, and a fair number of trees, by guaranteeing each brochure goes out once per customer. The biggest win is the single customer view itself: agents see the full picture of who they're talking to, which is what lets them deliver the experience people expect when they're planning to broaden their horizons with EF.