Deduplicating Student Records in Dynamics 365

Business Needs

• Improve the accuracy of student data within Dynamics 365 by identifying and resolving duplicate records more effectively
• Reduce the time and manual effort required for daily data cleansing processes
• Enable the identification of complex duplicates, including name variations and multiple email addresses
• Ensure more accurate lead reporting and eliminate double counting across campaigns

DQ Global Solution

DQ Global implemented an intelligent, rules-based deduplication and data quality framework within Dynamics 365 CE.

Business Benefits

• Identified several thousand previously undetected duplicate records
• Reduced daily duplicate management time from 1–2 hours to a substantially shorter
• Improved lead data accuracy, helping eliminate double counting and misreporting across campaigns
• Freed up valuable CRM storage by consolidating duplicate contacts, helping the university stay below system thresholds

Company Background

The University of Sunderland is a higher education institution with a strong focus on widening participation, student experience, and digital transformation. The marketing and CRM team plays a critical role in supporting the full student lifecycle, from initial enquiry and lead generation through to enrolment and graduation. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 as their CRM platform, the team manages large volumes of prospective student data and delivers communications via email and SMS to nurture engagement and conversion.

The Data Quality Challenge

We collect data through landing page forms/event registrations and imports of enquirers who are interested in studying at the university. In our current CRM system, the functionality for duplicate matching is limited and we can only match on first name/last name and email address. This causes us issues due to:

1. Abbreviations in First names
2. Various personal email addresses used
3. Double barrelled names.

Our current CRM system is not particularly user friendly and could take a member of staff anything from 1-2 hrs to go through processes each day depending upon the amount of potential duplicates.

We are also not able to find the people who have abbreviations in names/double barrelled names.

These problems mean that the data is duplicated within the contacts and being double counted as leads which is mis reporting.

The reason we investigated DQ Global was we understood there were many options we could build within the system and processes we could run that would keep our CRM system cleaner with better data and quickly merge the contacts to ensure data is accurate.

Enquiring with DQ Global?

After requirement calls the installation and configuration was seamless and quick. The team had one training call and had a chance to ask questions to find out how views were built. We are still in the process of this part and we know once we get some automation in place this will improve the process dramatically.

Fuzzing matching is something we have never had which will help greatly.

The Results

Using DQ for Dynamics is user friendly and takes less time to get through the daily process of duplication. Now we are in the process of cleaning a backlog of data, however as a day to day process the team have agreed this will cut down the process time massively.

The processes we are running now has enabled us to find 1,000’s of possible suspect duplicates which we could never find in our current CRM system. This is going to free up our contact storage in our CRM system, so we are not hitting thresholds.