We go to a few trade shows per year and we collect leads from these shows. We scan the customer badges and we get the data that each individual typed into their trade show registration. Unfortunately, the trade shows do not utilize an address validation, so we will get multiple entries that are slightly different.
For example, one contact can enter their address with Boulevard, Boul, Boul., Blvd, or Blvd.
Another example is with the Company name as Incorporated can be fully spelled out, abbreviated as Inc or Inc., or completely dropped off the company name.
Another example is within the street address is using a direction like 125 South Blue Bell Road, could also be 125 S Blue Bell Road, 125 S. Blue Bell Road, and Road could be Rd or Rd. or mistakenly enter as Street or Avenue or any abbreviation with or without punctuation.
Contact validation is much easier by using an email address, but Customer validation is much more difficult. Some customer names are very similar, some customers are located on the same street, some customers have the same numerical address, so trying to get a near match may yield too many false positives.
From what I remember, Epicor does NOT have an option to Merge customers (that were accidentally created as a duplicate customer), so cleaning up the customer data BEFORE it will be DMT pushed into Epicor is very important.
What are others doing to prevent entering duplicate customers from a long list of trade show leads (or any other list of potential customers)?
) would be 