Process to Dedupe CRM Contact Records

Duplicate customers and contacts is a big issue for us too, this is made worse by the fact that normal users can't help out to fix duplicate customers or contacts, the only people that can fix the issues are full admin users, It is important to have control but i would like to define some super users who are trained in merging contacts and customers but i don't want to give them full admin access so the burden falls on full admins to fix these issues manually.

Our current solution for de-duplication is to periodically export all companies to excel and use conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in both the name and dimensions account code columns merge all of those companies one by one in CRM, and then sort a-z on the name field to try and find duplicates that are spelt differently.
A very laborious task, which I'm sure could be speeded up with technology to suggest duplicates, but even better would be to solve the problem at source to prevent them being created in the first place. Our ideal solution would also include an option to make the dimensions account code unique so people would realise that there is already an existing customer with that code ( this would be a system option - appreciating that some users of CRM may require duplicate customercodes ).

Duplicate CRM Contacts are an even bigger problem, this is more difficult and laborious to fix. A wizard to help with this is essential, we find multiple issues such as first names and surnames reversed and again a simple user can't fix a mistake when they realise the contact already exists.
Multiple questions here, if the contact wishes to subscribe to a mailing list via a web form then which one is updated.
Sometimes a contact may need to legitimately exist in different companies with the same email address - the current interface is very confusing when asked to perform an action to choose which is the primary company. You just don't know which company each contact relates to.

Any help appreciated to get our data cleaner.

Thanks

There is now a "merge" record feature that allows you to easily merge two contacts that are duplicates. I'm leaving this request open though as that's probably only half the solution you're after. Just worth mentioning though!