How YMCA of San Diego County decreased duplicates by over 75% with Complete Clean

Highlights

• Partnered with Traction Complete’s sister company, Traction Rec, to migrate from a legacy system to Salesforce.
• Used Complete Clean to cut duplicate records in Salesforce by more than 75%, restoring data accuracy and improving member experience.

Overview

The YMCA of San Diego County is the largest YMCA association in the United States, with 14 facility branches and more than 3,500 employees. Through programs that support youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility, the organization strengthens communities across the region.

The Challenge

Duplicate record creation overwhelmed the team

When the YMCA of San Diego County migrated to Salesforce, duplicate records quickly became a major issue.

Part of the problem came from staff still getting used to the new system, occasionally entering the same contact or household more than once.

But the bigger challenge came from community users interacting with Salesforce through member portals.

When members went to create a new account, Salesforce automatically generated a new record if their email address didn’t exist in the legacy system.

Many members used multiple personal email addresses or updated them frequently, which made it nearly impossible for the system to recognize them as returning users.

On top of that, users often added or removed people from their household memberships, creating even more inconsistencies across records.

Over time, this combination of behaviors flooded the YMCA of San Diego County’s Salesforce environment with duplicate member and household records.

Manual cleanup created bottlenecks and burnout

Before long, the YMCA’s CRM contained more than 4,000 duplicate records, and new ones were appearing faster than staff could merge them.

Manual Salesforce data cleansing couldn’t keep up.

Every day, new records came in while only a handful could be reviewed and corrected.

I was spending 90% of my days working on duplicates, and I might have only been able to eliminate 20 or 30 in a day

Joyce Caudillo, Operational Software Manager at the YMCA of San Diego County

Duplicate data disrupted the member experience

These duplicate records impacted more than just data quality.

Community members were unable to log into their accounts, and billing errors caused many more to be charged incorrect prices.

These issues overwhelmed the YMCA’s call center with complaints that all traced back to duplicate data.

Manual efforts weren’t sustainable. The team needed a smarter, scalable solution to eliminate duplicates, restore data accuracy, and improve both staff efficiency and member experience.

Solution

Customizable merge logic reduced duplicate records by over 75%

The YMCA of San Diego County needed a smarter way to manage duplicate data — one that could handle thousands of records without manual effort.

That’s where Complete Clean came in.

Using Complete Clean’s guided, no-code interface, the the YMCA of San Diego County reduced more than 4,000 duplicate records to fewer than 1,000. Complete Clean’s flexibility allowed them to customize match rules and create multiple tiebreakers that pinpointed duplicates traditional Salesforce tools couldn’t detect.

For example, the YMCA configured Complete Clean to compare birthdate fields, a criterion unavailable in Salesforce’s native duplicate rules. They also built a series of tiebreakers that checked key fields like membership contract status and account balance to help identify winning and losing records.

You feel really good when you run Complete Clean.

You go through, preview the records, hit the merge button, and you’re done. And you’ve gotten rid of 300 to 400 duplicate records at a time.

Joyce Caudillo, Operational Software Manager at the YMCA of San Diego County

Now, every two weeks, the team runs Complete Clean to merge household and member records, keeping their Salesforce environment clean, accurate, and reliable

Cleaner data improved both staff operations and member experience

With duplicates under control, the YMCA finally had visibility into which staff members were unintentionally creating duplicate records. It was crucial insight that allowed the YMCA to provide targeted training to further mitigate errors and improve adoption of Salesforce best practices.

The impact was immediate for community members, too.

With cleaner data, members could log in seamlessly, access their information without issue, and feel confident they were billed correctly.

What once created daily frustration now worked as intended: a single, trusted record for every member and household.

I would recommend Complete Clean to every YMCA, JCC, and rec center.

Anybody with a database where multiple people are touching it, duplicates are always a problem and this is the best solution I’ve ever found.

Joyce Caudillo, Operational Software Manager at the YMCA of San Diego County

The Final Word

Duplicate records were creating a poor experience for both the staff and members of the YMCA of San Diego County. And manual deduplication was doing little to slow the growing problem. Complete Clean helped the YMCA team take control over their data, keeping the information that matters most and paving the way for clean, actionable data in the future.