Fiber Optic Center: Automating Duplicate Merging in Salesforce

Fiber Optic Center, Inc. (FOC) distributes fiber optic components, equipment, and supplies to customers who build cable assemblies worldwide. The company has specialized in this market for over two decades and built its reputation on personal customer service, delivered by inside sales, technical, marketing, and customer service teams who together talk to thousands of customers a week.

Automated duplicate merging now cuts the time those teams spend cleaning up customer records, so more of that time goes to the customer instead of the CRM.

Why did Fiber Optic Center need automated duplicate merging?

"Data quality is paramount to our long-term success at Fiber Optic Center," says Kelly Michael Skelton, Director of Digital Transformation at FOC. "Our team members, whether it's inside sales, technical, marketing, or customer service, interact with thousands of customers per week." FOC wanted every one of those conversations backed by a clean CRM, so any team member could give a customer the same accurate answer.

FOC migrated from its previous CRM to Salesforce in spring 2019. "Once we had enhanced the visibility into our data from Salesforce, we sought out data quality providers like Plauti to help us adjust and stay informed," Skelton says. Salesforce's built-in duplicate rules caught some of the problem, but not enough of it. "Salesforce duplicate rules work very well, but we needed a provider that could offer automation and an advanced interface for dealing with potentially duplicated data," Skelton explains. "We needed less day-to-day duplicate entry. We also wanted more insight when combining multiple customer databases and building new integrations."

How did Fiber Optic Center automate duplicate merging in Salesforce?

Before adopting Plauti, sales reps and the data quality team each spent part of every day merging duplicate records pulled in from different systems. "Now, we have one tool that is managed by our data quality team and that requires significantly less time," Skelton says.

The team especially values how easily they can rearrange data. "We were particularly impressed by the ability to pull in a report of potential duplicates," Skelton says. "We could merge critical fields right away, without ever having to access a record itself. Still, we maintained full control over what was merged."

How does Fiber Optic Center measure data quality today?

Plauti keeps FOC's team informed as customer details change. "It can even alert our team when a customer has transitioned companies inside our industry," Skelton points out. "We have tens of thousands of records. Sometimes the tool will show that a customer has moved on to a new position before we learn it from our checkups or sources."

FOC also tracks data quality ratings based on whether key fields on a record are filled in, and used Plauti to bring records in from several former databases so the team gets one full view of a person or company.

FOC still watches the numbers. "We actively monitor our object record totals and the number of duplicates that we're merging," Skelton says. "When we originally migrated, it was clear that we were combining lots of records with assisting information. Roughly 15-20% of our records required some form of combination when we initially migrated our former systems into Salesforce. Now, Plauti's role has transitioned into active data maintenance, eliminating the guesswork around possible duplicates."

As FOC adds more integrations and third-party systems, Skelton is confident the database will stay clean. "There's no doubt that it has helped us be aware, productive, and successful," he says. "It rapidly combined our systems and gives us peace of mind around our everyday data quality. I'd advise any business to commit to better data quality."