Precision Painting Plus Eliminates Duplicate Salesforce Records

Precision Painting Plus is a New York painting and home improvement contractor offering painting, wallpaper, carpentry and flooring services. The company works mostly with homeowners but also serves businesses, and it runs its entire business process on Salesforce, from the call center through to project completion.

Repeat callers were creating duplicate records

Most of Precision Painting Plus's business comes from repeat customers who call back to ask questions or change an appointment. Leads come in through a call center that uses Salesforce's CTI (computer telephony integration). The outsourced agents didn't search for the existing customer before converting a Lead into an Opportunity, Account, or custom object.

Katie Batilla, Salesforce Administrator at Precision Painting Plus, saw the pattern: "We would have one customer calling back to update an appointment or something, and they (the call center agents) would just rebook into a new Opportunity or Account."

Every repeat call that got rebooked instead of matched created a new duplicate. That hurt reporting and slowed down the field team. "It just clogged the pipeline – it made it harder for them to find the correct opportunity that they should be working on," Katie says.

Salesforce's built-in duplicate rules only cover Leads, Contacts and Accounts. Precision Painting Plus needed more: "We needed to deduplicate more than just the Lead, Contact, and Account object. We needed way more than that – Opportunities, even some Custom Objects," Katie says. That ruled out the standard tool and sent the team looking on the AppExchange.

Cross-object matching found what the standard tool couldn't

On the AppExchange, Precision Painting Plus found Plauti's cross-object matching, which checks for duplicates across different Salesforce objects instead of just Leads, Contacts and Accounts. The team built it into a custom Visualforce page using Plauti's Apex API, so call center agents search for duplicates without leaving the page they already work in. That customization mattered because the search had to run inside a screen built for the call center, not a generic Salesforce layout.

Fewer duplicates, cleaner pipeline

Two changes followed. First, call center agents no longer search for duplicates by hand. Salesforce now warns them automatically when a name they type matches an existing record, which stops new duplicates from entering through that channel at all.

Second, reporting on opportunities and accounts got more reliable. Katie also saw fewer complaints from the field about incorrect records, and far fewer requests to merge or delete excess opportunities. Field users find the opportunity they're supposed to work on faster, which has helped the team track conversion rates more accurately.