Accelevents Enhanced Contact Matching: How to prevent duplicate event registration records in Salesforce

Introduction

Event organizers juggle a multitude of tasks, from planning engaging experiences to ensuring seamless execution. Amidst the chaos, maintaining clean and accurate attendee data is often overlooked. Duplicate records in your Salesforce database can lead to confusion, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.

Thankfully, Accelevents offers a powerful solution to this problem: Enhanced Contact Matching. In this blog, we'll explore how this feature prevents duplicate records, ensuring your event registration data remains organized and reliable.

The Duplicate Data Dilemma for Event Organizers

Event management involves handling a diverse range of data, including attendee information, contact details, and registration details. Unfortunately, this influx of data increases the likelihood of duplicates creeping into your Salesforce database. Duplicate attendee records can lead to misunderstandings, such as sending multiple invitations or failing to recognize VIP attendees.

Empowering Event Organizers with Enhanced Contact Matching

Enhanced Contact Matching is a feature within Accelevents designed to address the issue of duplicate records head-on. It employs advanced algorithms and techniques to intelligently identify and prevent the creation of duplicate contact records. Let's explore how this feature works:

1. Smart Data Analysis: Enhanced Contact Matching employs intelligent algorithms to analyze basic attendee data, including names and email addresses. With 3 matching criteria, this analysis helps identify potential duplicate records by assessing the likelihood of two records referring to the same individual.

2. Fuzzy First Name Logic: Unlike basic matching techniques that rely solely on exact matches, Enhanced Contact Matching uses fuzzy logic on the attendee’s first name that considers variations, misspellings, and other common errors. It understands that “Robert Brown,” “Bob Brown,” and "Robbie Brown” might all refer to the same attendee.

3. Secondary Data Analysis: If one of the basic contact fields, such as the first name, last name, or email address, does not pass the criteria to match, the Enhanced Contact Matching looks at other data like their secondary email, mobile number, or street address that may possibly imply that the record is a match. For instance, Robert Brown signed up for the event using his business email address. And in Salesforce, Robert Brown’s existing record has his personal and business email addresses. Traditionally, Salesforce will try to match only to one of the email address fields, but with Enhanced Contact Matching, it will take a look at both fields to determine if this is the same person. If Robert signs up for the event and uses an entirely new email address, the algorithm will take a look at his mailing street to see if it matches. If it’s still not a match, the last resort is to see if his mobile number is the same. 

Here’s an example of the matching algorithms that Accelevents can include for contact records.

Benefits of Enhanced Contact Matching for Event Organizers

1. Precise Communication: Eliminating duplicate records means attendees receive accurate and targeted communication. This ensures important event updates, schedules, and personalized invitations reach the right recipients.

2. Time and Resource Savings: Merging duplicate records can be time-consuming and error-prone. Enhanced Contact Matching minimizes the need for such tasks, allowing your team to focus on delivering exceptional events.

3. Enhanced Attendee Experience: Attendees appreciate a seamless registration process and well-coordinated interactions. With accurate attendee records, you can provide a more personalized and enjoyable experience.

4. Data-Driven Insights: Accurate event data is pivotal for analyzing attendee demographics, preferences, and behavior. With duplicate records minimized, your analytics and reporting efforts become more meaningful and insightful.
   

Implementing Enhanced Contact Matching for Event Data

1. Feature Enabling: This feature is available upon request for Enterprise and White Label plans. Event organizers can reach out to their account managers and explain their requirements.

2. Configuration: Accelevents must be given access to the event organizers’ Salesforce sandbox account, where the configuration will be applied and tested. Accelevents will give the event organizer access to the developer account, where the sandbox account is integrated to test the enhanced contact-matching functionality.

3. Implementation: When all requirements are met, and tests are completed with accurate results, the enhanced contact-matching feature will be published in the live environment.

4. Routine Data Maintenance: While Enhanced Contact Matching is powerful, regular data maintenance is crucial. Schedule periodic reviews to keep your event data pristine and error-free.

Conclusion

Enhanced Contact Matching in Salesforce is a game-changer for event organizers seeking to provide exceptional experiences while maintaining accurate attendee data. 

By intelligently preventing duplicate records through advanced algorithms and fuzzy logic, this feature enhances accuracy, saves time, and ultimately improves the attendee experience. With Enhanced Contact Matching at your disposal, you can confidently deliver unforgettable events, knowing that your attendee data is accurate, reliable, and primed for success.