HubSpot Ideas

seobrien

More efficient way to find and merge duplicate contacts

The Sales CRM functions more as intended for lead capture from a web form where one email would be provided to create the contact record.  

You're thinking in terms of the CRM as a Sales and Marketing tool, which it is, but it's also just a CRM: Connected to Gmail it's getting new records daily from people that have multiple email addresses.  Moreover, just doing an import of addresses from other databases can result in multiple Contacts being created for the various email addresses someone might have.

Consider myself as an example, I have 12 different email addresses.  When I take a new client or job, I'll have another.  Those are 13 different records. They are all just me and each of those email addresses should be more easily uncovered as associated with the same person and merged.

 

What needs to improve
Today we have to go into a Contact records and use the Merge function to find the other emails and merge them.  That's a manual process. A pain for large Contact databases.

The Contact list should have a "Find and Dedup" option.  The CRM should find likely duplicates not based on the email identifier but other personal identifiers: same name, similar name in same location, etc.  Flag those in the list and make it easy to check the duplicate Contacts and "Merge" them.

This really needs to be done as part of the platform as growing companies, teams with many people using Gmail as part of their outreach, etc. will constantly result in new Contact records that can go unnoticed as duplicates of existing records.

143 Commentaires
jimharrison
Membre

At this time, there isn't currently a feature built in for finding duplicate contact/company/deal records within HubSpot outside of manually happening across them. I definitely understand where you're coming from with this need though, as I agree that it isn't very sustainable to manually look through your database for duplicate records (especially if you have thousands of records). I'm going to pass this idea along to my team, however, that feedback will only be coming from one voice.

DanielOConnor
Participant

Any company working with the National Health Service in the UK will have this problem. Their staff use two different emails and to make matters worse Hubspot automatically catagorises the staff as working for NHS Centrally- not for the spcific hospital...so this issue is a big problem! This would be a great fix!

nherczegh
Membre

I've inherited a mess of a list from my predecessor and I've been trying to manually fix what I can but seriously if there are 3 contacts named "Thomas Duplicaterson" in my list it would be nice to be prompted to review them. Or at least allow me to run a search for likely dupes. If I have a "Tom Duplicaterson" that works for the same company it should show up as well.

ahietpas
Membre

That would be a wonderful tool. We are having the same duplication issues.

em39422
Membre

A fix for this would be super helpful! Takes so long to merge each duplicate contact manually.

malcolmslater
Membre

Interestingly I have built functional fuzzy match tools that are easily configurable and do exactly this, and I am about to open source them. Would that be of interest to hubspot? I see so many products that can only do exact matching, but in the real world maybe 30% of records are misspelt.

 

Statut mis à jour : In Planning
AndyPitre
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Thanks for adding this idea. Helping customers identify and merge duplicate contacts and companeis is somethign that we are putting a lot of thought into. We appreciate the feedback and examples, this is extremely useful.

Statut mis à jour : In Planning
AndyPitre
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Thanks or this feedback. Making it easier to find duplicates in HubSpot is somethign that we're working on. I'm going to close this ticket and redirect to another idea ticket with the same request and more votes. Please feel free to upvote and comment on the following idea:

 

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/More-efficient-way-to-find-and-merge-duplicate-contac...

Tallanmktg
Membre

Any update on this? New to the sales side of Hubspot and this is a MAJOR issue. 

dmorgan
Membre

This is a regular and contstant thorn in the side of the marketing operations role. 

Having a tool that would identify duplicates before they cause other problems with sync and integration mismatches would be oh, so valuable. We run these tools in Salesforce, but need a separate matching utility on the Hubspot side. 

abenitez
Membre

Is there an expected date that this suggested feature will be incorporated into the CRM product?

chelocean
Participant

I would love to see triage for duplicates by name, would help our sales team immensely!

Invorio
Contributeur

People have multiple email addresses. I'd like to be able to enter them manually and also automatically through an intuitive merge process.

michaelhartzell
Contributeur | Partenaire solutions

The conversation today was about maintaining relationships and records with people who move to new companies in an industry.  We don't want to maintain the history and at times there are duplicates created - same person, same industry, same persona, new email/company.   

CTAKevin
Membre

Would like to see an updates on this since we have 30000+ companies in our CRM


@seobrien wrote:

The Sales CRM functions more as intended for lead capture from a web form where one email would be provided to create the contact record.  

You're thinking in terms of the CRM as a Sales and Marketing tool, which it is, but it's also just a CRM: Connected to Gmail it's getting new records daily from people that have multiple email addresses.  Moreover, just doing an import of addresses from other databases can result in multiple Contacts being created for the various email addresses someone might have.

Consider myself as an example, I have 12 different email addresses.  When I take a new client or job, I'll have another.  Those are 13 different records. They are all just me and each of those email addresses should be more easily uncovered as associated with the same person and merged.

 

What needs to improve
Today we have to go into a Contact records and use the Merge function to find the other emails and merge them.  That's a manual process. A pain for large Contact databases.

The Contact list should have a "Find and Dedup" option.  The CRM should find likely duplicates not based on the email identifier but other personal identifiers: same name, similar name in same location, etc.  Flag those in the list and make it easy to check the duplicate Contacts and "Merge" them.

This really needs to be done as part of the platform as growing companies, teams with many people using Gmail as part of their outreach, etc. will constantly result in new Contact records that can go unnoticed as duplicates of existing records.


 

tobias
Membre

Any update on this? No easy way to find contacts with duplicate names (e.g., those who might have submitted both work and personal emails) is a major pain point for us.

mzager
Contributeur

Very hopeful to see this coming soon - right now I export my entire database on a weekly basis, then identify duplicates in a few custom properties, phone number, name, etc. then manually find each duplicate in HubSpot and merge. Extremely time-consuming and frustrating.

809CharlieTango
Participant

I kind of need this functionality today. Has there been implementation??

asarraf21
Participant

This is more than a simple YES/NO matching.I regularly clean up my companies/contacts: I export all companies and contacts to EXCEL, do partial matching there and go through the list one by one to ensure accuracy. Sometimes there are two distinct companies with the same name or the same company with two different URLs. I guess the best way to approach it is to suggest a bunch of potential duplicates and let the user take the next actions.

JoeElliott
Membre

Not only would an auto de-dupe feature be great, but when merging data (contact or company) it would be beneficial to select what details are kept/displayed rather than just the newest value being kept/displayed.