Sales wants to block updates for active customer contacts - what do we think?

[Daisy_Spiridopo]

Hiya -

So the other day one of our customers completed a form and used their good email address but then bad information otherwise - just a lazy form fill. The result, however, was that the customer record in SFDC was updated by Marketo to replace First and Last name with the new values entered for that email address - so in this case, they overwrote the first and last name to just = "x" which is how the customer completed the form. Sales now wants us to block marketo from being able to update customer contact records and so i'm trying to think through whether that makes sense to do or not...can probably do it at the SFDC level and just not allow the marketo sync user account to change primary field, i.e. first, last, etc.

Anyone have this problem and/or have an opinion on the benefits/risks to a solution here?

Thanks!

[Justin_Norris1]

Hi Daisy Spiridopoulos​, it would be probably be easier to block updates from form fills for certain fields in the Marketo Admin.

Of course with either approach there are certain cases where data could legitimately change and you will miss the chance to capture that data. However this risk may be less of a concern than the chance of a lazy form fill destroying good data.

An alternative could be to use substitute fields in your form - e.g., populate a field called "Most Recent Phone Number" on the form (that looks identical to a standard phone field) and then copy it over to canonical phone field only if that field is blank.

In this way, the original data is preserved and the most recent form value is captured in a separate field and can be inspected by a marketing person or the sales owner to determine whether it should indeed overwrite the canonical value. A more labor intensive approach to be sure but a way of having your cake and eating it too.