Salesforce Duplicate Detection Alert

Overview

CF-234 is an intermediate-level scheduled flow that runs daily SOSL (Salesforce Object Search Language) searches to detect potential duplicate Contacts and Leads by email pattern. It queries recently created Contacts, searches for matching records across both the Contact and Lead objects, compiles a styled HTML dedup report, and emails it to the Salesforce admin team.

Use Case

Sales teams and IT admins need proactive visibility into duplicate records entering Salesforce. Manual dedup checks are time-consuming and error-prone. This flow automates daily scanning of new Contacts, cross-referencing them against existing Contacts and Leads via SOSL email search, and delivers an actionable report so admins can merge or remove duplicates before they cause data quality issues.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Update environment variables

Set flowlibs_DuplicateDetectionRecipientEmail to your Salesforce admin team's email or distribution list, and flowlibs_DuplicateDetectionLookbackHours to your preferred scanning window (default 24 hours).

Authorize connections

Open the flow in the designer and authorize the Salesforce and Office 365 Outlook connections with appropriate credentials.

Adjust SOSL scope

The flow searches across Contact and Lead objects by email. To expand the search to additional objects (e.g., Account), modify the SOSL RETURNING clause in the Search For Duplicates By Email action.

Turn On the flow

After authorizing connections, turn the flow on. It will run daily at 7 AM Eastern and email a report only when duplicates are detected.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

addHours(utcNow(), mul(int(variables('varLookbackHours')), -1))

concat('CreatedDate ge ', formatDateTime(outputs('Compute_Cutoff_DateTime'), 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ'))

concat('FIND {', items('For_Each_Recent_Contact')?['Email'], '} IN EMAIL FIELDS RETURNING Contact(Id, Name, Email, CreatedDate), Lead(Id, Name, Email, Company)')

not(equals(item()?['Id'], items('For_Each_Recent_Contact')?['Id']))

length(body('Filter_Self_From_Results'))