Streamlining data integrity: USGBC's journey with deduplication in Salesforce

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) works to change how buildings and communities are designed, built, and operated. Green building, in USGBC's view, benefits both the environment and the local economy. USGBC counts tens of thousands of member organizations, chapters, students, and community volunteers working to move the building industry toward more sustainable practices.

The challenge of duplicate data

USGBC's Salesforce contact data came from two places: an Outlook sync and manual entry by staff. Running both side by side created duplicate records over time. The team's fix was manual: pull a dump of every contact, check each one's email address for uniqueness, and merge matches by hand.

That process was slow. Poonam Soni, Business Analyst at USGBC, says: "That is something I would do on my end, but then I would get a lot of requests from other departments. It was very painful to manage this kind of data initially."

Finding a fit: deduplication in Salesforce

Plauti gave USGBC a way to run deduplication on a schedule instead of by hand. The team sets up a job once, runs it whenever it's convenient, and gets a report back, instead of repeating the same manual steps every time records need merging.

Plauti also lets USGBC schedule a merge to start automatically right after a job finishes, with no manual step in between. Poonam: "After every monthly job, a merge had to be done manually. I don't need to take that extra step – that is done by the application now."

Because Plauti also checks for duplicates in real time when a record is opened, the team catches new duplicates as they happen rather than only at the monthly job. "I'm not spending any time or effort on this anymore; all I do is configure it, run it at the end of every month, and the data is clean," Poonam says.

Results: a leaner, cleaner database

Since adopting Plauti, USGBC's monthly merge requests have dropped from about ten to one. That single remaining request is easy to handle, because manual deduplication hasn't been necessary since USGBC installed Plauti from the Salesforce AppExchange.

With deduplication running in the background, the USGBC team spends less time cleaning up data and more time supporting sustainable building practices worldwide.