How do I prevent adding duplicate customer records?
A: Thanks to our new Smart Search function, you may never enter a duplicate customer record again! We all know what it’s like when things get busy. You’ve got a customer in the showroom or service lane so you do a quick search of their name. No exact matches are returned and you don’t want to keep the customer waiting, so you quickly create a new record.
But if that customer already exists in your database, now you’ve got a duplicate record. Duplicate records create confusion and cost time and money.
Smart Search is an intuitive search function that is automatically activated when you click the “Add Contact” button. As you start entering data into the entry fields, Smart Search runs in the background, searching for probable matches. If it becomes apparent the contact already exists in your database, the system is going to prompt you with a visual presentation of the contacts with data that match the data you are entering.
When the system suggests a match and you see from all the duplicate data displayed that it is an exact match, all you have to do is click on the tab and that contact will open up. The information you were entering and the new contact record you created will be deleted.
The nice thing about Smart Search is that it only suggests strong matches. So it won’t start suggesting matches as you start typing in a few digits of a phone number, or just a first name. The system will only prompt you when there’s a high degree of certainty that the contact you are entering is a duplicate.
From our customer records, we can see that Smart Search is preventing over 100 duplicate records from being created every day!