Train your staff to do look ups on partial names, not full names. If you're looking up an individual's name, you should only have to type in part of the last name to find the record. The same goes for company names (i.e., organization records). Partial is better than full, because full increases the odds of misspelling, and thus missing finding the record.

My last name has a funky spelling and people unfamiliar with it will often mess up the order of the last three letters. So "lil" becomes "ill." If you type my name as "Trochill" instead of "Trochlil" you'll get a "no records found."

But here's the thing: Most modern systems automatically add a wildcard to the end of any word you type in the search bar. So if you enter "troch" rather than "trochill" you'll get all records that START with "troch." And guess what will be on the list? MY name!

Searching on partial names will help you avoid creating duplicate records ("Oh, you're not in here, I'll have to add you") and will improve your customer service ("Can you spell that again for me?").