The challenge
Leads arrived from a website form, paid campaigns and manual entry. The same person could exist three times with three owners, so the team stopped trusting the database and went back to their own notes.
Objectives
- Stop duplicate records being created at source
- Clean the duplicates and field noise already present
- Keep the correct owner and history when merging
- Restore enough trust for the team to use the CRM again
What we built
Custom functions that check for an existing record before creating a new one across every intake path, combined with scheduled scripts that clean up the accumulated field artefacts left by years of imports.
Technology
Deluge · Scheduled functions · Zoho CRM
How it was delivered
- Pre-creation duplicate checks on every lead intake path
- Matching logic across email, phone and company
- Scheduled cleanup functions for stray field characters and formatting
- Owner and activity history preserved through merges
- Logging so every automated action is auditable
Outcomes
- New duplicates are prevented rather than cleaned up later
- Existing duplicate records were consolidated with history intact
- Field data is consistent enough to filter and report on
- The team went back to working from the CRM