|
|
|
During the operation of a Customer Service System, a commonly encountered problem is the accumulation of "alias" or "duplicate" objects in the system.
Dovetail Software provides the users with two tools to eliminate these duplicates without loosing important information about them.
Merge Contacts tool provides an effective way of identifying, marking, and eliminating duplicate contacts from your customer service process.
Merge Sites works in a similar way to identify, mark, and eliminate duplicate sites.
An "alias" or "duplicate" objects is the presence of multiple data records in the database representing one individual contact or site, typically as the result of a minor differences in the spelling of the name. An example of a duplicate contact could be the presence of three contact records "Mary Smith", "Mary J. Smith" and "Mary Joan Smith" in the database, all representing the same individual customer "Mary Smith". For sites, 'Headquarters' and 'Head quarters' may be the same site, but are listed twice.
A customer service agent may inadvertently add these aliases to the database if they cannot find a correct object for some reason in the database, or by interfaces performing batch loads of data from other systems. The problem with these aliases is that they can skew metrics, as well as result in customer service errors when contact attributes (such as fax number) are changed for one alias, but not the others. As a result, it is desirable to identify and potentially eliminate these aliases from your customer service processes.
There are two general phases of the merge process. The first is the identification and marking of a contact or a site as a duplicate. The second is the processing of marked duplicates to eliminate them from your customer service processes.
The contact marking process is performed using the Mark Contacts for Merge Form. The actual merging is performed using a command line script that executes Batch Preview and Merge process on the server.
The site marking process is performed using the Mark Sites for Merge Form. The actual merging is performed using a command line script that executes Batch Preview and Merge process on the server.
Both of these merge scripts are run from the command line. Each one is designed to use the CScript.exe script host. The normal usage pattern from the command line is as follows:
CScript mergeContactsBatchJob.wsf parameters
If CScript is not specified, and WScript is specified instead (or set to be the default script host), the pop-up messages will be displayed during the execution of the merge process. To avoid the pop-up messages from being displayed (and halting execution of the merge process), remember to specify CScript as indicated above.
See Also |
Next |