As Customer Success Manager, I spend a lot of time looking at customer data—and I used to think our duplicate prevention was rock-solid. We had Plauti Deduplication set up, with scenarios covering the “Email” and “Phone” fields. Job done... right?

Not quite.

One week, a sales rep came to me completely puzzled. She’d entered a new contact, and Plauti flagged it as a duplicate—but the main email addresses were different. What was going on?

After a bit of digging, the culprit became clear: the real duplicate was hiding in an alternate email field. It hit me—our checks were missing cases where important values, like emails or phone numbers, were tucked away in secondary fields.

Sound familiar? Here’s how I solved it—so your team can, too.

The Duplication Trap: Same Data, Different Fields

Imagine this:

• Contact A: Main Email is empty, but “Alternate Email” is “[email protected]”
• Contact B: Main Email is “[email protected]”

If your scenario is only checking the “Email” field, these two will slip past as unique records. The same goes for “Mobile” and “Phone”—duplicates can lurk across fields.

Absolutely! Here’s an easy-to-read, story-driven article, rewritten from the perspective of a Customer Success Manager, to publish on your customer community:

Hidden Duplicates: How I Helped My Team Catch Emails & Phones Wherever They’re Hiding—A Real-World Guide

By: [Your Name], Customer Success Manager

As Customer Success Manager, I spend a lot of time looking at customer data—and I used to think our duplicate prevention was rock-solid. We had Plauti Deduplication set up, with scenarios covering the “Email” and “Phone” fields. Job done... right?

Not quite.

One week, a sales rep came to me completely puzzled. She’d entered a new contact, and Plauti flagged it as a duplicate—but the main email addresses were different. What was going on?

After a bit of digging, the culprit became clear: the real duplicate was hiding in an alternate email field. It hit me—our checks were missing cases where important values, like emails or phone numbers, were tucked away in secondary fields.

Sound familiar? Here’s how I solved it—so your team can, too.

The Duplication Trap: Same Data, Different Fields

Imagine this:

• Contact A: Main Email is empty, but “Alternate Email” is “[email protected]”
• Contact B: Main Email is “[email protected]”

If your scenario is only checking the “Email” field, these two will slip past as unique records. The same goes for “Mobile” and “Phone”—duplicates can lurk across fields.

The Fix: Combine Your Clues

The answer wasn’t complicated—but it was clever. We needed Plauti to compare all possible fields at once, not just one at a time.

How? By building a “Combined Field” in Salesforce, and then making sure our deduplication scenario checked that field for duplicates.

Step 1: Combine Your Fields in Salesforce

Work with your Salesforce admin to create a formula field (for instance, “Combined Emails” or “Combined Phones”). Have it join together all the relevant email or phone fields, separated by a character—like a semicolon.

Now, all relevant email addresses are in one field for each record.

Step 2: Update Your Deduplication Scenario

• In Plauti Deduplication’s DC Setup, go to the right object (Lead, Contact, etc.).
• In the Scenarios tab, Add New Field and pick your combined field.
• For Matching Method, use “Email Address” for emails or “Partial Exact” for phones to catch formatting variations.
• Set the Threshold—100% for true exact matches, or a shade lower for fuzzy matching.
• Apply the scenario to Manual Insert Prevention and Manual Update Prevention so your team gets instant feedback.
• Save and publish.

Step 3: Test and See the Difference

We also made a video tutorial on Youtube: Please see it here: