TelVue reduces duplicate case records by nearly 50% with Case Merge Premium.

Highlights:

• Before Case Merge Premium, TelVue's support team spent 20% of their time cleaning cases
• TelVue chose Case Merge Premium because it preserved every piece of information through a merge
• The cleaner data fixed more than the queue: RMA and shipping workflows run faster, and performance metrics reflect actual workload
• TelVue has benefited from Case Merge Premium since 2016, which has been seamlessly adapting to changes TelVue has made to their business processes and Salesforce org

Since 1986, TelVue Corporation has built broadcast technology for local and community television. Their HyperCaster servers run PEG (Public, Educational, and Government access) channels for cable operators and municipalities, plus broadcast programs at K-12 schools and universities. Across its customer base, TelVue reaches over 60 million households and three million students. Supporting a customer base that size depends on Salesforce running cleanly.

But customers would open multiple cases for the same issue, causing a mess in Salesforce. Sometimes this happened when they hit reply-all on email threads, which would open new cases. As a result, TelVue's support team spent up to 20% of its time cleaning duplicates. Depending on which case a customer replied to, conversations became siloed in separate threads, and context disappeared with them.

Returns come with the territory when you ship hardware. Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) numbers were tied to case IDs, and TelVue runs shipping through Salesforce, so the system of record had to line up with what was physically going out the door. When one issue had three duplicate cases, nobody could tell which case held the right RMA or which one to ship the replacement from. Reps had to read through every case in the cluster to find the correct RMA, cross-reference case numbers against shipping records, and figure out which case the tracking number should write back to. RMA fulfillment slowed and the manual triage work piled up.

The friction caused by duplicates had real downstream effects. Reps would unknowingly do conflicting work on the same issue. Time-to-first-response was thrown off, queues looked bigger than they really were, and the team's performance metrics didn't reflect actual workload. As Mark Steele, Chief Information Officer, put it: "If we weren't merging, we'd probably have 2.5-3x the cases we currently have."

Mark flagged the problem and asked his team to find a fix. TelVue looked at a few options on the Salesforce AppExchange, and Case Merge Premium covered everything on their list. What sets Case Merge Premium apart is that duplicates are automatically surfaced and merging is streamlined. Old case numbers stay referenced, contact details stay together, and case history carries through.

With one case per issue, metrics make sense again. Time-to-first-response and case queues reflect real work, so TelVue's performance metrics are based on accurate numbers. RMA assignment and shipping workflows stopped breaking across duplicate records.

Duplicate cases are inevitable in any support org. The question is what you do with them.

TelVue has been a customer since 2016. Case Merge Premium has handled every change they've thrown at it, including their Lightning migration. They kept it even after Salesforce rolled out its own basic case merge feature, because the native version doesn't preserve case history the way Case Merge Premium does. Mark's own summary says it best: Case Merge Premium is a "great remediation tool."

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