Question

Merge Accounts in Salesforce

  • 6 November 2016
  • 12 replies
  • 184 views
aviv_caspi
Hi,



I have a question regarding the merge operation in SF.



Let's say I have 2 accounts in SF while only one of them has a record in GS, meaning only one of them has a Customer Info record related to it.



The 2 records in SF are duplicate records so we want to merge them.



What will happen in GS as a result?



I can see in the Data Anomalies section that right now I have some accounts that have multiple Customer Info records and this is because of the merge.



Do you know why is that?



Thanks!

12 replies

seth
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +6
Hi Aviv,

You're spot-on, that the Data Anomalies page is in large part to help with merged Accounts. I believe that essentially it's just checking that:


  • Every Customer Info record has an Account ID
  • For every Customer Info record, no other Customer Info records have that same Account ID
  • [i]The same thing but vice versa: for every Account record that has a Customer Info ID, no other Accounts have that same Customer Info ID.
I can tell you that I just go ahead and use the buttons in that page to clean things up when it tells me that things need cleaning, and I haven't run into problems.



The only thing I'm not clear on is, if you're merging two Customer Info records, which record's data takes 'precedence'. Ultimately, it's not a problem for us, since all the info on there is populated by Gainsight, and even a few custom fields I've added to it are refreshed by Rules daily or weekly, by pulling data from elsewhere. So, by merging two Customer Info records, I would never lose data that's [i]only being stored there and that would be unrecoverable.
Director of Community, Gainsight
aviv_caspi
Thank you for the detailed answer. Very helpful.



Do you know what is the backend process in GS when we are merging accounts in SF? I want to understand what is the cause for the data anomaly in the first place (maybe I need to change something in the process of merging leads in SF).
seth
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +6
I could only really make educated guesses at the exact mechanics, Aviv -- sorry to have reached the end of my knowledge!
Director of Community, Gainsight
manu_mittal
Rank
Userlevel 6
Badge +1
Hi Aviv,



Here's what might happen based on how you are merging SF Accounts:


  • If both Accounts were added to Gainsight as Customers, then you'd most likely end up with duplicate Customer records after the merge. This is because both Customer records would now point to the same merged Account.
  • If only one of the Accounts was added to Gainsight as a Customer, then the end result should depend on the [i]master record you select during the merge process. If you select the Account that's not in Gainsight, you'd still have the Customer record pointing to the merged Account, but the CustomerInfo lookup might not be populated. If you select the Account that's in Gainsight, you shouldn't see any discrepancies/anomalies at all.
Hope this helps.



Thanks,

Manu
aviv_caspi
Thanks much Seth!
aviv_caspi
Great! This is very helpful.



Good to know 🙂
johnny_burtchaell
Badge
If you merge to the newer Customer Info ID, you may lose any comments that were stored on the 'old' Customer info ID. 
jahnavi
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How to access the Data Anomalies page?
jahnavi
Rank
Badge
How to access the Data Anomalies page?
pele
Rank
Badge +3
Hi Jahnavi, 



To get to the anomalies page, you can pull up any page in your Gainsight instance and replace the url after "apex/" with "DataAnomalies".



For reference: Data Anomalies Product Doc
lila_meyer
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +4
Thanks, Pele! We appreciate members helping other Community members!



Lila Meyer, Dir. Global Education Services
pele
Rank
Badge +3
Thanks, Lila! I've definitely been the beneficiary of the knowledge-sharing in this community more often than not 🙂

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