Data governance and deduplication in the CRM: what to decide and what to configure

The same customer appears three times in the CRM: with the full name, with an acronym and with another person's email. Each salesperson sees part of the history. This guide explains how two widely used platforms detect duplicates, per their own documentation, and what leadership should define.

A note: the features, limits and requirements come from Microsoft Learn and the HubSpot knowledge base, cited at the end. We did not review Salesforce's documentation because its help page could not be opened. The governance recommendations are Cyrrus's judgment.

How does Dynamics 365 detect duplicates?

According to Microsoft, the Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service apps include default duplicate detection rules for accounts and contacts, but not for other record types. To detect duplicates in other records you must create new rules and turn them on.

A rule lets you choose the record type, the fields and the comparison criterion, for example exact match, same first characters or same last characters, whether it is case-sensitive, whether it ignores blank fields and whether it excludes inactive records. Microsoft recommends basing the criterion on a field with unique values, such as email. Five rules can be published at a time for the same base record type.

How does HubSpot do it?

Does your CRM hold data you can trust?

We review how your data is captured, duplicated and corrected, and design the governance rules.

• Matching and merge rules
• Owners and data quality routines

See CRM selection

HubSpot states that it compares property values daily to surface possible duplicates. By default, contacts are compared on fields such as name, email, phone, zip code and company, and companies on domain, name, country, phone and industry. Pairs can be reviewed one by one or in bulk and merged or rejected. A HubSpot warning: merged records cannot be reverted.

According to the same page, custom rules, the audit log and bulk management at larger volumes require its Data Hub product, which is another subscription.

What should leadership define?

Five governance rules, per Cyrrus's judgment. First, an owner: one person answers for the quality of the CRM's data. Second, the matching criterion: which fields make two records the same customer (email, domain, tax ID). Third, who approves a merge and which record prevails, knowing that in HubSpot it cannot be undone. Fourth, which fields are mandatory when creating a record and from which sources data comes in. Fifth, a periodic review routine with an indicator that someone watches.

When does it matter most?

Clean up before migrating or connecting

We prepare the data before changing CRM or connecting it to the ERP.

• Phased cleanup plan
• Criteria for what to migrate and what not

Talk to our team

Before connecting the CRM to the ERP, because the integration copies what is there, duplicates included, and before changing CRM, because you should decide what gets migrated. For the first, see how to integrate ERP and CRM.

How we can help

At Cyrrus we design data governance rules and support cleanup, without selling a product of our own. Learn about CRM selection and the guide on what a CRM is.

If you do not know how clean your data is, request a free diagnostic session with our team.