Recently as our company has grown through additional service lines. We've encountered duplication of records (companies and contacts) where we need to merge records to clean up our instance. In doing so, I discovered that even by selecting the primary record, certain fields may be overwritten/changed by the secondary record if more recent activity has taken place on certain unprotected properties. Some of the primary info is retained, other are activity prioritized. The issue is some of the fields like the Owner is not retained on the primary, etc if a more recent activitity on the secondary has taken place. Support's answer is to review the secondary for fields and change/update prior to merging. This is both inefficient and time consuming.
My idea / suggestion is the system should default to the Primary record selected since you're merging the secondary's properties into the Primary. I would think also, the information on the secondary record would only update properties which are not populated on the primary if applicable, along with the activities. The User should know which record should be kept whole, thus any merges should just "merge" the other record's activities and properties.
