How WatchBox Built a Single Customer View in Salesforce

WatchBox needed a single, trusted view of its customers inside Salesforce Sales Cloud. Legacy data migrations and a growing set of inbound channels — website contact forms, Facebook and Google lead ads, phone, text, and marketing integrations — were creating duplicate Person Accounts and splitting up each customer's history. Plauti gave WatchBox's client advisors one unified view of every customer, so they could personalize service based on a complete record of past purchases and interactions.

About WatchBox

WatchBox (thewatchbox.com) buys and sells certified pre-owned luxury watches, all authenticated and graded Collector Quality. The company operates from offices in the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, and Dubai, with thousands of watches in inventory at any time.

WatchBox's fragmented customer data across channels

WatchBox is a global company, and customer relationships sit at the center of its business — particularly in the luxury watch market. "Our clients and client advisors build lasting relationships," says Ian Swain, Director of Enterprise Products at WatchBox. "Our clients may have an affinity with specific brands or watch styles, and understanding that through their previous purchases and interactions allows us to provide them the best recommendations and customer service."

WatchBox's client advisors need to identify the right customer with the right information in real time, across whichever channel that customer prefers to use. "Being able to match those expectations and provide our clients with a consistent experience across their preferred channels is invaluable," Swain explains. "It's only possible through accurate real-time data and a strong single source of truth."

Salesforce Sales Cloud is where WatchBox keeps the single source of truth for each customer. But legacy data migrations, combined with the number of channels feeding data into Salesforce, had eroded that single view. WatchBox's website is its main source of new leads: a contact form for customers making an offer on a watch creates a new Opportunity alongside a new Person Account. Facebook and Google lead forms, inbound phone calls, texting, and other marketing integrations all channel additional data into Salesforce, on top of records that end users create directly and need validated in real time.

Left unchecked, this created duplicate and inconsistent records — the kind that can skew reporting and damage the customer experience. WatchBox uses historical transactions and engagement data to personalize marketing and strengthen relationships with each customer, so messaging an existing customer with content meant for new customers, or getting account ownership wrong, was a real risk.

How Plauti stopped duplicates at the source

Salesforce's standard matching rules couldn't keep up with WatchBox's volume and complexity of incoming data. The search for a way to unify and validate the customer record in Sales Cloud led WatchBox to Plauti.

The first challenge was WatchBox's existing duplicate data. "We did a handful of initial deduplication projects and consolidation jobs," Swain says. "Because we deal with large amounts of data, we ran that processing on our own machines, which sped up the work considerably." A team first reviewed the search results manually, tuning the matching and merging settings until they found the right balance. "After finding the sweet spot in the configurations, we added automated functionality through auto-converting and merging. We use auto-merging regularly with our cross-system integrations," Swain explains — the initial cleanup delivered value from the first run.

WatchBox has since put preventative checks in front of every channel feeding Salesforce. "We have preventative auto-convert jobs that run daily for Leads converting to Person Accounts, using different formulas and weightings."

The feature that has mattered most to WatchBox's team, though, is the simplest: real-time duplicate warnings built into the standard Salesforce edit screens. "The manual prevention functionality has provided the most user value," Swain says. "We've put that into the standard Salesforce editing functionality, so our team members know right away if they're typing in matching customer information. That alone prevents a lot of potential problems." WatchBox also added a duplicate-check component to every record page, so users can see at a glance whether a matching Lead or Person Account already exists.

Stronger customer attribution across WatchBox's business

Since putting duplicate prevention and cleanup in place, WatchBox's insight into its customers has grown, because historic transactions and behaviors are now attributed consistently to the right account. "By cleaning up and consolidating our data with Plauti, we've been able to more efficiently attribute and consolidate customer buying behaviors and further strengthen our customer relationships," Swain says. Segmentation has become far more precise, letting WatchBox personalize the experience for each individual customer.

A more connected experience followed. "Accessibility is paramount to customer service," Swain explains. "It's important to us that our clients can engage with their client advisors when they need support — whether that's through a different channel, a different phone number, or a different email, especially with the new communication platforms that have launched over the past two years. Our clients are now able to do that."

Swain reports business growth month over month since adopting Plauti, and credits the platform with helping make that possible. "It's been invaluable, and we're using it more and more. It makes maintaining a single customer view easy."

Looking ahead, WatchBox wants to push validation further upstream. "We're exploring ways to integrate the platform's functionality more throughout our ecosystem," Swain says. "We're looking at using APIs from MuleSoft to run our validation before data reaches the Salesforce org at all" — moving duplicate prevention from the point of entry in Salesforce to the integration layer in front of it.