As a result of a new business strategy related to the launch of a new product, Key2Act found that there was no process in Dynamics 365 to cross-reference existing customer accounts against new leads to prevent duplicate records.
Complete D365 Data Management Solution
DQ for Dynamics™ works inside Dynamics 365 to improve data quality and provide you with data that is fit for business use.
Following a very detailed setup, DQ for Dynamics identified and merged over 260 leads with existing contacts and accounts within Key2Act’s CRM system. In addition to this, Key2Act also processed over 16,000 new leads with confidence to know that they will send the right marketing messages to the right people.
Key2Act is an innovator in the building intelligence, field service and construction management markets offering two advanced technology platforms. At Key2Act our mission is to unlock the value of client data. Over 600 clients turn to Key2Act, not only for our industry expertise but for the knowledge extended by our professional services and customer-centric teams to deliver solutions that simplify complex business problems.
This project was the result of new business strategies related to a new product launch. Sales and Marketing were focused on obtaining profiled lead lists from various sources for new marketing campaigns, and we had no process in Dynamics 365 to cross-reference existing customer accounts against new leads to prevent duplicate records.
Our current data quality in Dynamics at the time was good but we knew duplicates existed. The addition of thousands of leads caused us to seek out a solution that would more accurately find duplicates and allow us more flexibility in managing and merging duplicates than what the out-of-the-box features in Dynamics gave us.
It was critical for us not to add new leads into Dynamics for companies/accounts that already existed in the system.
We designed a process to create leads in Dynamics by importing lists containing names of people with companies that were profiled for our marketing campaigns. The standard Dynamics duplicate detection features did a good job of keeping duplicates from being added when there was an exact match on the email address to an existing lead or contact. It did not help to accurately identify the names of people with companies that we had as an existing account in the system; these new contacts would be managed differently than new leads.
Once our lists were imported, we needed a way to cross-reference the new leads based on “company name” compared with existing accounts. Accounts in our Dynamics system are existing customers and prospects with whom sales have already developed a relationship. We did not want marketing to include these leads in the same marketing initiatives used for companies we were actively working with. It’s common for us to have multiple locations of one larger corporation (i.e. Company ABC – Midwest, Company ABC – Southeast, etc.) and we have to know when a new location of an existing company is added. We needed more of a “fuzzy logic” check for variations of company name, etc. and the Dynamics process did not give us what we needed.
Ideally, we wanted to keep duplicates from being added as new leads in Dynamics. However, if the leads were added first and duplicate checking was done once they were in the system, we then needed a better way to merge records we deemed to be duplicates. The standard Dynamics duplicate detection and merge processes only allowed us to merge one duplicate at a time, and further, it was very limited in the data presented to help confirm records were duplicates and to determine which record was the “master”.
We chose the DQ for Dynamics solution which uncovers more duplicate records than the Dynamics process identifies. We are now able to look at company names and contact names in Dynamics by normalizing the existing data to do the comparison. When duplicates are found, we compare many more fields of data to determine if it’s a true duplicate, and we merge multiple records at once or skip records when they are not a real duplicate.
We went through a very detailed setup to make sure we are looking at the right data to determine a duplicate, and to make sure we’re merging and updating the right fields from duplicates to master records. With our first few imports of new leads into Dynamics, we were able to identify and merge 268 leads with existing contacts/accounts. We processed over 16,000 new leads with confidence to know we will send the right marketing messages to the proper group of companies. The initial review of duplicates was done manually to help us understand the data and perfect the setup of rules used to find duplicates. As future imports are done the duplicate processing can be scheduled to run automatically without any manual effort based on the rules we have developed. We estimate the time saved as 1 hour per 100 records; if the sales team adds 2,000 leads a month, the time saved per month could be as great as 20 hours.
The upgrade was quick and easy; we maintained all of our configurations with the upgrade which was expected, but seeing is believing for us. The new UI has a cleaner and more defined layout which makes it easier to use. The use of colour and shading, as well as new icons, make things stand out a little better so they’re easier to find at a glance. It’s obvious there was a big focus on making the app easier to use, and we appreciate that! We’re still learning, so making it easier to use is a much bigger benefit to us than simply adding new functionality.
The biggest enhancements for us are the following:
Working with Conor has been very easy because he has a good understanding of how Dynamics is used to understand our pain points and process requirements. The training he provided was done in a few shorter sessions to give us time to take action after each session to configure and create more meaningful and accurate sessions from the beginning.
We had a few occasions to work with the developer/support through configuration and testing, and he also was very understanding of how Dynamics is used and was able to quickly respond to the needs we had.
DQ Global went above and beyond for us in a few situations where our requirements were not fully met by their functionality. They enhanced their product to fit our needs, all within the original scope of our purchase agreement.
