Autofill / Prompt for Account name in Web Forms

Hey Francesca,

This may not be the best idea as you may inadvertently expose your list of accounts in an unauthenticated/open website. If it is a known user/Contact in a portal, then you probably know the account already.

Regards,

Romney

Hi Francesca,
It can work well if you use the contact's email domain to identify an account or have another key for identifying link a particular contact with an account.
Is it relevant to your situation?

Regards,
Mykola

You have a very good point.

That might work, the request comes from upper management and I'm still thinking through the practicality and/or feasibility of such a system. 
I believe the intent is to reduce misspellings, diverse spellings and potential duplicates.

We often face similar tasks when customers ask to improve account-based-marketing.

It's beneficial since it reduces errors, improves data quality, and automates lead to account linking. Additionally, it makes easier data entrance on the website, so it is a benefit too.

Nevertheless, If you choose the option with emails' domain, this will require a set of customization on the Sugar side (or in the middleware layer) to ensure quick response on the website like accounts' domains management (links between domains and accounts, their control and conflict management processes support, collection of domains data, reflecting of corporate domains of multi branches companies, public domains like yahoo, Gmail, etc.). Every company is unique in its way, and it influences the solution.

If you need help or consultation, I'll be happy to share our experience.

One possible approach is to take advantage of Elastic that is already installed and has the relevant information. When the customer/prospect submits an external form, the data is saved as is but it will trigger a check against Elastic to find similar entries. In one of our implementations, we used a scheduled task to regular to scan these new records and notify CRM users when a potential match is found. 

Good point. 
An alternative approach would be to use a third party data provider and "clean up" the data upon submissions, not using your data but that provider's. Just like some sites propose a "corrected" (normalised) postal address. Then you match with your own CRM DB in the backend. This requires a high level of data quality. 

In France the Government offers some of that data for free (opendata): company name, registry number, postal address. There are API quotas of course. 

Added benefit: you can capture more data than what is typed by the visitor (registry number, business category etc). 

Some otther companies may provide the same service, both for form submissions and for existing data cleaning. 

Interesting approach, I'm just looking for an effective way to search for possible duplicates in LEADS after somebody created a new contact or account. In the case that similar leads where found they should be listed in a special area of the contact/account recordview as links to these records to enable an effective lead conversion for the user.

I would create a small native AJAX snippet in the web form which calls a custom endpoint in Sugar for Account search which just returns the formatted list of possible matches.

Do you have any suggestions on the criteria to determine "similar"?

Things can get complicated with people using abbreviations, multi-language terms, with and without accents and umlauts etc..