How NPG Cut Duplicate Data in Salesforce with Plauti

Neue Pressegesellschaft, or NPG, is an umbrella company that manages a collection of digital and print media brands across Germany. It publishes daily newspapers, magazines and advertising papers, and runs radio and TV, reaching a large daily audience from its base in the southwest and east of the country. Its three biggest newspapers, Südwest Presse, Märkische Oderzeitung, and Lausitzer Rundschau, together reach over one million people. Timeliness, accuracy and consistency in customer data are part of daily operations at NPG, and they directly affect how well it serves advertisers and readers alike.

NPG runs its B2C operations on Salesforce. In 2020, as part of a broader data-quality initiative, the team set out to build a single, 360-degree view of its customers. Jennifer Herr, Salesforce Admin at NPG, says a fully complete 360-degree view is "impossible" — but the goal was to get as close to it as the data allowed. Soon after starting the project, NPG found its Salesforce data cluttered with duplicate records, and Salesforce's built-in tools weren't enough to fix it.

In this case study, NPG Salesforce Admin Jennifer Herr and Salesforce user Katja Gloßmann describe the data-quality problems they faced and how NPG solved them with Plauti.

What data-quality problems did duplicate records cause at NPG?

Data-quality problems often surface after a specific event — a merger, an acquisition, a data migration, or a customer complaint. At NPG, the trigger was its move to Salesforce Sales Cloud as part of the push toward a 360-degree customer view.

Jennifer recalls the scale of the problem: "Shortly after our launch of Salesforce, we had around 1 million accounts in the Cloud. This data comes from a wide variety of sources and contains different kinds of information. It was therefore difficult for us to recognize duplicates."

As NPG automated more of its marketing and sales processes through Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, duplicates became a bigger obstacle. Jennifer explains: "We use a lot of different automations. Duplicates have complicated the development and expansion of these automated processes. If we came across a duplicate with one of our automated processes, it was hard for the system to identify which was the correct record and which was not."

Subscriptions are core to any media business, and NPG manages several publications with information coming in from multiple channels. Duplicate subscriber records made that harder to keep straight. Jennifer describes a common pattern: "Sometimes our readers use different contact details when they get in touch with us. For example, they subscribe to our newspapers with one e-mail address and enter competitions or webinars with another e-mail address." Mismatched records like these erode trust — in the data, and in the subscription itself.

Why didn't Salesforce's native tools solve the problem?

NPG's first attempt was to fix duplicates using native Salesforce features. That wasn't a realistic option. Salesforce is a strong CRM, but it isn't built as a data-quality tool, and its native deduplication features aren't sophisticated enough for large, complex data sets. Jennifer sums up the experience: "We tried the Salesforce standard to merge duplicates, but we soon found out it wasn't enough for our data complexity."

How did NPG choose a data-quality partner?

Once native Salesforce functionality proved to be a dead end, NPG needed to find, and trust, a partner quickly — the team couldn't afford to keep losing time to the problem.

NPG found Plauti in 2021 and began exploring how it could help. After an introductory call and a demo, NPG decided to move forward with Plauti to build a new standard for data quality across the organization.

What results has NPG seen since switching to Plauti?

NPG has seen a significant drop in duplicate records, cleaner subscriber data, and smoother automation across its Salesforce processes. Jennifer describes how much of the cleanup now happens without manual work: "Plauti is a great help to us," she says. "It merged over 90% of our detected duplicate records automatically, cutting the need for manual work." Cleaner data has also made customer interactions smoother and less error-prone.

Cleaning data used to take significant time away from other priorities. Jennifer puts a number on the change: "90% of the time we spent on cleaning data is now free for something else because Plauti is supporting us." That freed-up time now goes toward more strategic work. Looking back at the decision to act, Jennifer adds: "We are very happy we didn't wait another year."

Why does NPG consider Plauti a partner rather than a vendor?

Better performance and fewer duplicates are only part of the story. Fixing data quality isn't just a matter of installing software — the people behind it matter too. Jennifer describes the relationship as trusting and service-oriented: "I always know that if I need something or need help, someone from the Plauti team is there to find the best solution with me."

NPG also values how quickly Plauti's product keeps moving. Jennifer points to Plauti Cloud as a recent addition the team has adopted, on top of ongoing improvements to the deduplication tools NPG already relies on.

NPG's push for a 360-degree customer view was held back by duplicate records that Salesforce's native tools couldn't fix. Partnering with Plauti closed that gap: NPG now automates most of its duplicate cleanup, spends far less time on manual fixes, and is closer to the single customer view it set out to build in 2020.