What are False Duplicates?

 

False Duplicates occur when the tool finds a high degree of similarity between two records which are not actually duplicates.  This can happen for the following reasons:

• Similar names or name spellings between two records: The more alike the names and spellings of names, the more similar the records are to each other, so a higher ‘Likeness Percent’ will be calculated by the tool.
• Different people working for the same business: Since the business name (and in some cases the phone number) might be the same across multiple records, they will be identified as having a high degree of similarity between them.  If you find this happening a lot, you may consider excluding the ‘Company Name’ field as one of the examination process fields.
• Incorrect use of comparison fields in the examination process: If you select comparison fields that contain a low degree of uniqueness (where only a handful of values are used across all your records, this would include fields such as ‘Status’ or ‘Customer Type’) then there will be a higher degree of similarity between records that are otherwise different.

Click here to see more on how to keep false duplicates to a minimum.

Click here to see how to avoid processing false duplicates more than once.

 

Related Topics

Introduction