The Jewish Agency for Israel counts on clean data to help thousands of refugees

Bringing order to chaos

"With the invasion in Ukraine, we were suddenly dealing with a huge number of potential immigrants." says Rael Olwyn, Salesforce consultant for TechUnity, "And due to the war and associated trauma, these people often are unable to take their official documentation with them, are unable to enter all details correctly, they quickly change phone numbers over short periods of time, or file multiple requests. To make sure we know everyone's location and to be able to provide travel and accommodation in the right locations, it was important to deduplicate our database and match people with their family members. We use the Contact and Account objects as well as custom objects for this purpose."

TechUnity implemented Salesforce at the Jewish Agency for Israel to facilitate their regular processes in 2007. People can request help in their emigration process through web forms or local staff.

“ We have all kinds of things making our lives difficult in finding duplicates. Sometimes people use their English names, sometimes their Hebrew names, people using different alphabets, and changes in address or phone number. ”

Rael Olwyn Salesforce consultant for TechUnity

To handle the sudden increase in requests in an exact but quick manner, TechUnity decided to implement Duplicate Check.

Delicate work

"Merging contacts is very delicate at JAFI. People are going through life-changing events, so we cannot make any mistakes. That's why we choose to merge all duplicates manually."
When asked about the process before using Duplicate Check, Rael tells us: "The database manager spent 1.5 hours a day reviewing and merging duplicates after getting requests from emissaries from all over the world. With Duplicate Check, that is down to 30 minutes per day. We are now catching the duplicates before our local staff catches them."

To reduce the time spent on duplicate management even further, Rael plans on using the set for merge and DC Live functionality: "After we have fine-tuned our scenarios, we will provide our call center staff with the ability to immediately see on a Contact page if they are dealing with a potential duplicate. If that is the case, they will flag the Contact for a manual review by a colleague from the data quality team."

Final advice

When asked for some advice for organizations considering improving their data quality Rael responds: "The main thing is that your organization is ready for it. Make sure you have the manpower, assign responsibility, and develop a roadmap for the data quality changes you are making."

Regarding the main reasons for choosing Plauti: "The solution being native is a big differentiator for us. We are working with very sensitive personal data, so the fact that the data stays within Salesforce is very important from a security and privacy point of view. Using a native solution also makes it much easier for us to get the users onboard. The UI is identical to Salesforce, and they are already logged in to Salesforce all day."