How Wedgewood Weddings Cut Duplicate-Merge Time by 93% and Set a Booking Record

From 5-minute manual merges to 20-second automation, and 575 tours booked in a single day.

Wedgewood Weddings manages nearly 100 venues and fields thousands of inquiries from couples and their families. Bad data there isn't just annoying. It's expensive: a duplicate lead inflates the pipeline, a typo in an email address closes a two-week booking window, and every five minutes spent manually merging records is five minutes an agent isn't spending with a couple planning their wedding.

Wedgewood Weddings, a US hospitality and wedding-venue company, built its business on a simple idea: good data drives good decisions. As it scaled, manual data-quality work couldn't keep up. Duplicates multiplied, contact center agents got stuck untangling household records by hand, and the Salesforce team spent two years firefighting instead of building.

Then Wedgewood Weddings put duplicate merging and contact verification to work directly inside Salesforce, and used them to reshape its contact center, free up its team's time, and lay the groundwork for AI. Here's how.

Meet Alex Casey, Sales Technology Innovator

Alex Casey is Wedgewood Weddings' automation architect. When something breaks in Salesforce, he fixes it. When the business needs a new integration, he builds it. When more than 600 users need their workflows to run faster, he makes it happen.

His mission: cut manual work, keep the data accurate, and give teams tools that move at speed.

The challenge: duplicate leads and unverified contact data

Planning a wedding is a team effort. At Wedgewood, that often means the same event generates several inquiries from different family members: one partner submits a web form, the other emails, and a parent calls the contact center. One wedding turns into three separate leads in Salesforce.

The contact center tried to clean this up by hand. Every suspected duplicate required an agent to:

• Compare records side by side
• Copy and paste data field by field
• Re-parent child records
• Mark records for deletion manually
• Access fields they shouldn't normally touch

Each merge took about 5 minutes. Multiplied across hundreds of leads, that's several hours lost every day.

At the same time, agents had no way to check contact details before reaching out. The most common problems were typos in email addresses, incomplete or wrong phone numbers, and leads that looked clean in Salesforce but bounced or went straight to voicemail. In the wedding industry, that matters because Wedgewood Weddings has a two-week window after first contact to schedule a venue tour. A bounced email or wrong number closes that window, and the booking is lost with it.

That cost showed up as wasted agent time on dead-end outreach, couples left waiting without knowing they'd made a typo, and lost revenue from missed bookings.

"It's our job to deduplicate these leads. It's not the client's job," says Alex Casey, Sales Technology Innovator at Wedgewood Weddings.

A Salesforce team stuck in firefighting mode

"That was the first two years of me joining this team. It was just firefighting," Alex says.

After rolling out Salesforce to venue teams in 2020, Alex's team spent the next two years fixing broken workflows, answering urgent tickets, and patching data-quality problems one lead at a time. The root cause was data quality at the foundation, and especially in the contact center, and until that was solved, the team couldn't escape the reactive loop.

Why Wedgewood Weddings chose Plauti

When evaluating solutions, Wedgewood Weddings had four requirements.

Salesforce-native first

The team had been burned before by non-native tools with fragile external connections. "We've had some bad experiences with non-native platforms. Whenever you have an outside connection, that's where you're always going to have potential for issues," Alex says. Plauti's duplicate merging and contact verification run inside Salesforce itself, with no syncs, external hops, or extra integrations to maintain.

Flexible and customizable

Wedgewood Weddings' householding logic is specific: which record stays primary, how dates are preserved, and how events are grouped all matter. The team needed a solution that could adapt to its own flows, objects, and rules, not force it into a one-size-fits-all setup.

Works inside Salesforce Flow

Alex's team runs on automation, and Salesforce Flow is central to that. "I love, love my flows. It's my bread and butter. And so being able to put Plauti into Flow is awesome," Alex explains. Duplicate merging and verification plug directly into Flow, so checks run automatically without manual steps.

Ready for high volume

Wedgewood Weddings runs a high-volume contact center and keeps expanding into new markets. Any solution had to handle large datasets quickly, reliably, and at scale.

The solution: deduplication and verification built into Salesforce

Starting where it hurt most: the contact center

Wedgewood Weddings rolled out duplicate merging and contact verification in the contact center first, where the pain and the payoff would be most immediate.

On the duplicate side, the team replaced a manual, multi-step merge with a single "Merge" button, applied householding rules so one wedding equals one lead even when several family members reach out, and preserved the original creation date so relationship tracking stays accurate. Knowing when the first contact happened matters: if a parent reached out a month ago and the bride just submitted a form, Wedgewood Weddings wants that original timestamp to measure pipeline maturity correctly.

On the verification side, contact center agents and flows check email and phone data in real time, flagging invalid contact methods before an agent wastes time on outreach and correcting issues instantly so the couple gets contacted quickly. All of it runs inside Salesforce, on Wedgewood Weddings' own standard objects and flows.

"You can override the standard new-record buttons with buttons that check for duplicates and bad contact data built in. As you're entering a new lead, it will just tell you right there that there's a duplicate or the email is wrong. You don't have to create it, let it process, and then wait," Alex says.

Results: from firefighting to record-breaking performance

Merge time cut by 93%

"In order to merge one of our leads, it would probably take about five minutes. Whereas now we do it in about 20 seconds. And that adds up," Alex says. In a high-volume contact center, those 4 minutes and 40 seconds saved per lead add up to hours, and to headcount.

Contact center efficiency up 25%

That extra capacity didn't mean layoffs. Wedgewood Weddings redeployed freed-up contact center agents to higher-value work, like customer service for its client portal. "We were able to go from four venues per contact center agent to five. That freed up some of our contact center agents to help in other departments, like our client portal," Alex says.

A record day for tour scheduling

"When you're trying to schedule 575 tours in one day, speed is really important. Two of our core values are speed and results," Alex says. Clean, verified data let Wedgewood Weddings move fast without sacrificing accuracy, so the team can trust its numbers when measuring performance.

Rebuilt trust, less double-checking

Bad experiences with earlier tools had created adoption problems and mistrust. Even when a system said "sent," users weren't sure, and they'd check with the Salesforce team directly, creating double work for Alex and his team. "We've seen it happen once or twice where a project didn't go as planned. People just don't use it, and it's so hard to get them to trust it again. They keep reaching out to us to double-check, which creates double work for us," Alex explains.

With clean data backing every decision, that trust is rebuilding. The goal is for users to rely on the system itself, not on back-channel confirmations.

Looking ahead: data quality as the foundation for AI

Wedgewood Weddings is preparing for AI, and Alex is clear about the precondition: there's no useful AI without trustworthy data. "I think my biggest fear with bad data and AI is that it's going to give poor recommendations or results. There's nothing worse than implementing a project, rolling it out, and then it not doing as well as you expected. Then you get mistrust, and you have to work twice as hard to convince people it's fixed," Alex says.

In weddings, there will always be a human touch; couples want real conversations about napkin colors and table arrangements, not conversations with a chatbot. But Alex sees room for AI to help his team work smarter, if the data feeding it can be trusted. "There's always going to be the human interaction. No one wants a bot asking what color napkins they want for their wedding. But there's a lot of room for AI to help our end users do their jobs better. That's one of our big driving factors for adding more Plauti use cases this year: making sure all of our data is as accurate as possible, so when we start implementing AI, it's using good data, not something skewed."

How Plauti supports the AI roadmap

• Removing duplicates that would otherwise inflate metrics
• Keeping one wedding equal to one lead, for clean training data
• Verifying phone and email accuracy, so AI recommendations are actionable
• Providing a clean, consistent source of truth for machine learning models

Why Salesforce-native matters

For Alex and his team, a Salesforce-native solution wasn't a nice-to-have. It was a dealbreaker. The benefits they point to:

"I just really like that it's all built in. We can pull duplicate checks into our Flows. You can override the standard buttons with ones that check for duplicates and bad contact data built in. As you enter a new lead, it tells you right there that there's a duplicate or the email is wrong. Again, we're just saving time and making everything a little more efficient," Alex says.

From firefighting to innovation

Solving data quality in the contact center was a turning point for Wedgewood Weddings' Salesforce team. Instead of spending all their time patching problems and handling tickets, they can now:

• Tackle structural issues
• Roll out new projects
• Experiment with AI and automation
• Support new markets without losing control of their data

"We did a few big projects to fix the underlying structure of a lot of stuff," Alex explains. "Since then, it's been a lot less firefighting and a lot more 'where can we make improvements and add new things.' I'm always learning something new. It's my favorite part of this job."

In Alex's words: why this is a game changer

"Two of our core values are speed and results. So for us, Plauti is a game changer because we're able to quickly and easily ensure that data is accurate, both in terms of verifying that we have the correct phone and email, and in the sense that when we say we have one lead for this event, we have one lead for this event. We don't have duplicates falsely inflating stuff.

We've been heavily focused on data since we opened, because with data, we can make smart decisions. Without it, you don't know that you're making the right decision. Being able to say with accuracy that we have correct data is a huge thing for us," Alex says.

What accurate data means for couples

For Alex and his team, clean data isn't only about efficiency metrics or operational ROI. It's about the couples planning the biggest day of their lives.

When data is accurate, contact center agents can:

• Respond faster during the critical two-week booking window
• Reach the right people the first time, with no bounced emails or wrong phone numbers
• Focus on the conversation instead of the cleanup
• Deliver a smooth, personal experience from the first inquiry through the wedding day