Automatically merged contact

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

Hi! I need help with a contact issue.

We had an existing contact in our CRM named Kristin, but it looks like her contact record was overwritten or automatically merged with another contact, Patrick, after he signed up for our newsletter. Now, all the logged activity and data are showing under Patrick’s name, and Kristin’s contact record is gone.

No one on our team manually merged them, and we suspect it happened automatically—possibly due to a shared or mistakenly entered email address.

Is it possible to recover Kristin’s original contact record or separate the two contacts again?

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi @brannylin,

This can happen if a particular setting is not enabled. In the Options tab of the forms editor in HubSpot, you need to enable this setting:

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Without this enabled, contacts submitting the form from the same browser will lead to overwritten contact records, yes.

It is not possible to unmerge these contacts, you would have to manually create a separate contact record and unentangle them. Merge records

Best regards

3

Hi @brannylin! We actually built Emergency Unmerge for exactly this type of situation.

It can reconstruct contacts that were accidentally merged, whether the merge happened manually or automatically, and lets you review the recovered records before restoring them.

If anyone finds this thread later and runs into the same issue, you can run a free scan to see if the contact can be recovered:

4

Hi @AimLeigh and thank you for sharing this integration with the HubSpot Community! :confetti_ball:

Alternatively, here are a few helpful steps you can take in HubSpot for this:

  • You can start by checking the surviving contact’s Merged Contact IDs property. If needed, we can also export the merged record history from the past 90 days to confirm if a merge took place.

  • If it turns out the two contacts were merged, we can try recreating “contact A” as a new contact. You’ll just need to remove the email from the additional emails on the current record, and then you can set up a new contact with that same address.

  • If “contact A” was added through a newsletter signup, it’s possible this was an automatic deduplication by shared email. HubSpot does this by adding new form data to an existing contact when the email address matches, rather than merging manually.

Thanks and have a lovely day!
Bérangère