A Salesforce administrator has a big challenge to manage the quality of Salesforce data and he can accomplish the vital task by taking some smart steps for Salesforce data migration. They have to make some great improvements to their Salesforce instance and have to spend time in these activities also apart from training users, answering questions and fixing broken things. The Salesforce administrator in a non- profit organization has bigger challenges and the responsibility of quality data is more crucial. An administrator does not have time to pore over each and every individual record to make sure about the cleanliness and usability of data. A bad data can undo the leadership confidence in their investment in Salesforce. Now it is the time to go smarter about managing your organization’s data and here are the few steps for Salesforce administrators to get started with Salesforce data migration.
Learn and implement ETL tools
Cleaning thousands of records in just a single click is a real kind of magic and the magic wands behind it are the ETL tools. ETL tools stand for Extract, Transform and Load tools.
A good practice in this regard is to create accounts and contacts in Salesforce with the use of Salesforce data loader which is an ETL tool as well. This will surely help in saving a big time in manually keying the records and all the resulting human errors that may come during the process. You can also use some Salesforce tools to evaluate the content of your spreadsheet against the data entry in Salesforce, map the fields and create an entry in Salesforce only for people who are not in your database.
Use Data Validation Rules With Salesforce Data Migration
Data validation rules are the best tools for a lone wolf admin. The admin can use the validation rules for blocking the creating or editing records when your specified criteria are met. Salesforce has put together a number of samples to work and learn from them in this regard. For example you need to ensure that the phone number field is made up of ten digits only and likewise.
Another important thing regarding Salesforce data migration is to validate your addresses. The addresses are interpreted by different people in different ways and therefore they can go wrong in many ways. For example- Some may write 4th Street, 4th St. 4th St, etc. You will always get different answers when you ask different users. The most important thing is to validate, validate and validate. Address validation tools look at the addresses you enter, try to match them with a known address and then reformat your data into a friendly and structured address. It can save a lot of your company’s time and it will be great when your organization is sending out printed mailings.
Teach and document your users
The other main thing in Salesforce data migration is that you should help your users to figure out the things out for themselves. Create help text for the fields you create so that users know what the input should look like with concrete examples.