A Technique to Help Alleviate Duplicate Customers in NetSuite

If your company runs on Oracle NetSuite and you find that your users continually create duplicate customers even after training and retraining, you may consider that their global search results are not as helpful as they could be. This article explains a technique that your administrators can use to help everyone in your organization do a better job searching for and finding existing customer records before creating a new ones.

It's All About Results

I see that when many companies go live on NetSuite they sometimes miss an opportunity to set the system up for success. It's the little things that go a long way in helping with adoption and quality of the outcome. User input should be audited and assessed regularly during the months after go live.

Some things I like to do at the onset / go live to help NetSuite system Administrators

1. Lock down dashboards, manage them per role.
2. Create standardized VIEWs
3. Restrict some VIEWs on a role by role AND record-type basis

These techniques allow an administrator to manage per role rather than per user per role which can be a daunting and insurmountable task to institute after the company is live and starts to scale. This approach allows one to easily push new or edited VIEWs out to everyone at once and properly coordinate communication and training.

Don't Leave things to Chance.
This Technique is an Important Nuance.

Setting up a saved search for "Customers", making it public, and defining it as the designated search template for "Results" will helping your end users more effectively find existing customers in your system.

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Make sure that the search is marked public and available as list view.

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In the results, it's helpful to add things like Name/ID, billing address, zip, and state. If your company is using one world and multi-subsidiary customers then the quality of end user training is important.

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I find it helpful to add highlighting to call-out where a company may be winning or needs to be cautious.

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Make sure that your available filters make sense with the column set previously chosen.

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Be sure that the audience is set to ALL applicable roles.

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Clicking the checkbox under the "Results" column will lead to this saved search being set to be used as the default for the global searches for this record type. In our case "Customers".

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Further Reading...

Duplicate Detection Preferences

You can change how NetSuite searches for duplicates on the Duplicate Detection page. You can have NetSuite search for duplicates among customer, contact, partner, or vendor records and search for matching information in certain fields.

To prevent you from merging records that are not duplicates, you can only merge records if they have the same tax registration number or if both records do not have tax registration numbers entered. If you use NetSuite OneWorld, records with different subsidiaries cannot be merged.

Duplicate Record Notification

Users are notified of potential duplicates in three ways:

1. When you open a record that has potential duplicates, a notice is shown at the top of the page with a link to potential duplicates.
2. When you are creating a new record and enter matching data in fields that are set up as duplicate criteria, a warning is shown at the top of the page with a link to the potential duplicates. If you have permission to view those records, you can click a link to open those matching records.
3. When you add a record from a list by using Quick Add or you use the Inline Editing feature to make changes to a record that would make it a duplicate, you also receive a popup warning.

These notifications can help reduce the number of duplicate records created in your NetSuite account.

I hope you found this technique helpful.

NetSuite equips you with a comprehensive set of tools to maximize the efficiency of your software investment, benefiting both your team and the broader business. If you require expert NetSuite assistance, in process optimization, development or training, please feel free to contact us.