Choose which properties to keep when merging contacts
I'm proposing being able to select certain properties to keep when merging.
While merging contacts I realized that a lot of the properties of the new record are not accurate for the contact because when merging it selects the most recent value. While in some cases I can see how this would be useful, there are others where it is not. For example, we run our contacts through an email validation software and when I merge 2 accounts, one with a valid email and the other with an invalid email, sometimes the property for the new merged account will say the email is invalid since that is the most recent value for that property. We don't re-run our contacts's emails through the validation again until much, much later, since this is costly. So through merging I end up invalidating valid contacts.
I would love to be able to select which contact information stays in the merge or even just pick which contact has the information you want to keep. We use the AirCall integration which creates a new contact if the phone number hasn't been entered on the contact. This causes a ton of duplicates in our system and most of the time, the AirCall contact is the newer contact but has a name of "1########### Aircall new contact" and that name gets used when merging instead of the contacts actual name.
Please make this possible! Just a simple screen showing the properties that have values & allowing us to select whether to keep the value from Contact A or Contact B. Or if that's too complicated, just show us the values side-by-side so we know what we're getting into.
The function to select which values (A or B) should be kept is essential for accurate data management in an enterprise CRM. It should be a default function or at least provide the option to predefine rules or conditions for this. It makes no sense to just keep the most recent value. @hubspot It is crucial to make this function possible to ensure reliable data management, please follow this up!
My use case is that I have a list of land parcels that I skip traced to find the owners. In many cases a single person owns several of these parcels. The parcel data is all custom contact properties that I created. By merging the contact I lose all the parcel data except for one, I would like to keep ALL parcel data for a single contact.
