A customer record can be duplicated for ordinary reasons: a different email address, a spelling change or an import from another system. The useful question is how the team identifies and resolves the mismatch without losing important history.
A practical example
Create two fictional records for the same customer with different contact details and open activities. Ask the platform to flag the possible duplicate, then inspect the merge process. Check who can approve it and how an incorrect merge would be investigated.
What to check
- Define the fields used to identify possible duplicates and the limits of those rules.
- Inspect what happens to activities, attachments and permissions during a merge.
- Assign responsibility for corrections and recurring import problems.
The trade-off
Strict matching can miss duplicates, while broad matching can combine different people. Keep a review step for uncertain cases and avoid treating every software suggestion as a confirmed identity match.
Research context
Microsoft documents duplicate-detection rules for its platform and the role of matching criteria. These are product-specific controls; equivalent behaviour must be checked separately in another customer-management system.
Read the original reference material. The practical examples and evaluation questions above are TheTechGlow’s editorial application of the topic, not reported results from a product test.
Explore Customer Relationship Management and Customer Data for topic coverage, or continue to Marketing Technology for the wider sector.
References and further reading
- learn.microsoft.comhttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/set-up-duplicate-detection-rules-keep-data-clean
