Validating First Name and Last Name for Leads

[sardamit]

Hello,
I have a huge list of leads and have the names segregated as First Name and Last Name.
However, in some cases, the names have been switched.

For e.g.: Some of the records have correctly placed the lead name 'John Smith' as John under First Name column and Smith under Last Name column. Other records in the list may have these names switched under the two columns.

My challenge here is to figure out if the first and last names of a lead have been correctly placed under the right columns.

I have email IDs for some of these leads, and the emails do not necessarily contain both first name and the last name of the lead.

Amit

P. S.: This is my first question on this forum. I tried to search for this question on the forum but couldn't find anything. If I have violated/ignored any rules of the forum, do let me know.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Hi Amit

Having worked in the industry, I would suggest that you need to have the data cleaned/validated, properly. Muddling up names when reaching out to leads has a great risk of losing the lead! I wouldn't stand for it if I were your client.

However, to address the question. If I were to have a go (which I wouldn't) then I would compile two lists. List one would be a list of common first names. List two would be a list of common last names. I would lookup the respective components against the lists for validation. Keep in mind though, that this is far from an exact science. There are plenty of people with first names that are common last names and vises versus.

You could try and integrate a check back to email, but then again there are various email conventions, such as (first name).(last name), (first initial).(last name) and many, many more. If you do integrate then you could safely assume that first.last is by far the most common convention.

 

[sardamit]

Jon,
Thank you for your inputs.
I had something similar in mind:
- Having a list of common first names and last names; But here, I may need a probability for each name which indicates whether it is more likely to be a first name or last name.
- Checking Last Names against the Email IDs while testing with a hypothesis like: The likelihood of Email IDs containing the Last Name is higher than that of First Names.

As you said, this is not an exact science and I may have to play around with it to find a good enough answer.

Thanks again.

Hi Amit

Having worked in the industry, I would suggest that you need to have the data cleaned/validated, properly. Muddling up names when reaching out to leads has a great risk of losing the lead! I wouldn't stand for it if I were your client.

However, to address the question. If I were to have a go (which I wouldn't) then I would compile two lists. List one would be a list of common first names. List two would be a list of common last names. I would lookup the respective components against the lists for validation. Keep in mind though, that this is far from an exact science. There are plenty of people with first names that are common last names and vises versus.

You could try and integrate a check back to email, but then again there are various email conventions, such as (first name).(last name), (first initial).(last name) and many, many more. If you do integrate then you could safely assume that first.last is by far the most common convention.