How Chicago Fire FC Eliminated Duplicate Fan Records in Salesforce

Chicago Fire FC is a Major League Soccer club that manages ticketing, corporate partnerships, and fan engagement through Salesforce. As the club's fan base grew, so did the volume of data flowing into that Salesforce org, and with it the risk of duplicate fan records.

For Chicago Fire FC, soccer drives community health and engagement as much as it drives ticket sales. A duplicate record in Salesforce means a fan who doesn't get recognized, a survey response that doesn't sync to the right contact, or a partnership that gets tracked twice.

The challenge: duplicate fan records piling up in Salesforce

Chicago Fire FC's Salesforce data grew fast, and duplicates followed. Jacob Knoerl, CRM Analyst at Chicago Fire FC, describes how it happened: "Right from the start, our database expanded so quickly, making it tough to ensure accuracy, especially with Salesforce's existing rules. We encountered issues with data arriving from different sources, leading to duplicates. For instance, someone might register on our ticketing site with one email and then use a different one for a survey, creating multiple Salesforce profiles for a single person."

Data arrived from ticketing, corporate deals, fan surveys, and app notifications, each source with its own format. Merging it correctly, in real time, was necessary to keep fan profiles from fragmenting across duplicate records.

As the club's fan base and partner network grew, the team decided to upgrade how it handled that data rather than let the problem compound.

Finding and merging duplicates automatically with Plauti

Chicago Fire FC adopted Plauti to consolidate overlapping and duplicate case records in Salesforce, including merging cases, without adding manual work for the CRM team.

Scheduled jobs and Plauti Cloud

Two features did most of the work: scheduled jobs and integration with Plauti Cloud, which runs the deduplication process on a schedule rather than by hand.

Scheduled jobs:

• Automated deduplication: identifying and merging duplicate records runs on a schedule instead of manually.
• Operational efficiency: automated data management freed the team to focus on other work instead of manual reviews.

Plauti Cloud integration:

• Centralized data management: running deduplication through Plauti Cloud gave the team one place to manage data across sources.
• Consistent processes: deduplication became more consistent across data coming from ticketing, surveys, and other systems.

The results: faster syncing, fewer duplicates

Since adopting Plauti, Chicago Fire FC has seen a consistent drop in data errors, especially when syncing survey responses to the correct contact. Cleanup that used to take up to an hour now takes a couple of minutes, and the CRM team spends less time reviewing and correcting duplicate records.

• Faster data syncing: survey responses now sync to the correct contact instead of creating a separate profile.
• Time back for the team: data review that used to take up to an hour now takes a couple of minutes.
• Fewer duplicates to review: automatic deduplication runs in the background, so the team isn't manually reviewing and correcting duplicate opportunities.

Looking ahead

Chicago Fire FC's data volume will keep growing as the fan base and partner network grow. Scheduled deduplication jobs give the CRM team a way to keep pace without adding manual review work, and Jacob's team can spend that time on other priorities instead of data cleanup.