Inaccurate Information Submitted on Forms - How Are You Handling It?

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

We're implementing forms on our site and wondering how everyone is accounting for information submitted on forms that doesn't match what's on the lead record. For example:

1. A lead name Jessica exists in the database
2. Jessica wants to download a piece of content from our website
3. Jessica is in our CRM but the form doesn't populate her first name
4. Jessica enters her first name as Karah
5. Jessica first name is overwritten as Karah in the CRM

Any insight as to how others are dealing with this is appreciated!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Please move the thread to Products and someone will answer it there. "Community" is for website feedback, not product support -- and yes, this is confusing!

[Anonymous]

Thanks, sanford! It's been moved.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Thanks for moving it over.

You're going to have a lot of difficulty (well, pretty much 100% difficulty) immediately classifying the new data in this case as inaccurate. If Jessica's real or preferred name is Karah (and people do change their first names over time) then s/he is actually correcting the lead record.

In any case, if you block field updates (in Marketo Admin) then you will prevent the field from being changed once it's non-empty. What you can then do is have a proxy field called "Lead-Supplied First Name" that is labeled as "First Name" on the form. Then manual inspection can be used to determine whether a correction is in order.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jessica,

Various possibilities here:

1. Use a different set of fields for webforms and copy the entered value to the CRM standard fields only under certain conditions using either Marketo data management campaigns or CRM workflows
2. Authorize Marketo to update fields on CRM leads but not on CRM contacts. This is done through changes to the profile of the CRM sync user. Please note that account fields are always protected by default and cannot be updated by Marketo.
3. Block field updates in Marketo admin -> field management. The problem here is that it's a one off and cannot be made conditional (vote )
4. Have some proxy fields to store backups of CRM fields and, under certain conditions, use these backups to restore the values after a form entry.

I have seen the second technique used in companies where sales were complaining on Marketo updates on contacts fields. The #3 is not used that often, because it's not flexible enough. The #1 is used sometimes, but is error prone in large marketing teams (sooner or later, a marketer will use the standard fields in form instead of the webform specific ones). The #4 is a little complex to implement but does a good work of protecting data.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Gregorie and Sanford! I see the problem with classifying is inaccurate right of the bat but don't want to lose any capabilities so we ended up creating some Marketo fields for these to show sales the data reported on the forms compared to the data collected elsewhere. Should be interesting to see how it plays out.