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 Kommentare
Dylan
HubSpot-Produktteam

If you are interested in becoming an early beta tester of this product once it is developed - please fill out the beta form here.

dstemo
Teilnehmer/-in

@jakekirsch Same! I just started using Inscyle, and it is a great tool for now, but to be able to do this exclusively in HubSpot (and also have some type of "duplicate notification") would be amazing.

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

We just launched our first HubSpot de-dupe integration early (was scheduled for the 15th) - https://dedupe.ly/hubspot

 

Has bulk merging, fuzzy matching, email notifications and more. Plus it comes with a 7 day free trial.

Evans4316
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

Still in planning? Arghh!  😞

Status aktualisiert zu: In Beta
Dylan
HubSpot-Produktteam

Hello HubSpot community - I'm excited to let you know we have an early version of this tool available in a private beta. If you are interested in becoming an early user of this product - please fill out the beta form here and we will be in touch if you are a good fit.

 

Note: We will not be accepting every submission into the beta,  but we will be reaching out to submissions that are a good fit for the early version of the tool.  

DanielOConnor
Teilnehmer/-in

sorry had to edit and canrt find out how to delete

jebacka
Mitglied

Adding to this idea: 

 

It would be great if, when merging companies or contacts, you could choose which information to keep.  I have numerous duplicates where one version has the correct domain but the other has other correct information.  When they merge I inevitably lose some of the correct information and have to re-enter it manually. 

 

Thanks!

Julia

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

@jebacka This is something we have built into Dedupely. We call it custom merging. It allows you to both select the master contact (the id you want to keep) and customize which fields you want to keep between the matches.

 

Today we're getting very close to also launching company merging (among a few other improvements). If we find any last minute bugs, it will be released by the end of the week.

 

You can check out more here (comes with a 7 day free trial).

jebacka
Mitglied

@clintonskakun does this only work with contacts?  My duplicates are under companies. 

 

Thanks,

Julia

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

@jebacka Companies are still in development. We plan to release them within the next few days (before the end of the week.

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

@jebacka We've just added company merging today. You can try it out here with a 7 day free trial and 100 free merges.

DarrenLester
Mitglied

A while ago, we built a simple tool to solve the Company duplicates and bulk merging problem for ourselves. Connects to your database, checks for duplicates across Company Names and Domains, allows you to check them, change the Primary record where necessary, and then automates the Merge process - exactly like if you were to do it manually.

Keen to make this available to others and get some feedback on how to improve it if anyone is interested? @jebacka @BrittG @dstemo @realizeit @jameslyons @DanAt3DV

choyt
Mitglied

Okay, I have to say that I just started using the CRM two days ago and this is one of the first issues that we ran into, granted it started in our other CRM and is the result of moving into HS and cleaning them up.  However, the fact that it's taking HS this long to put something together when the Dedupely team have built something so quickly that in just moments cleaned up hundreds of duplicate companies for me and is now scanning for contacts might be pretty telling.

I'm testing the CRM and looking hard at the support and service over the next few months before deciding if we want to use the full suite that HS offers.  This is not a great first impression.

Hat tip to the Dedupely team - thank you for this and I was an immediate upgrade.  $20 a month is well worth it.

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

@choyt Happy to hear you had a good experience merging companies with Dedupely. We'd also love to hear any other data related problems you need solving.

tamibrehse
Mitglied

 We need this as well from a Company standpoint. Oftentimes two contacts within the same company will come into the system with slightly different company names - Acme versus Acme Inc. for example. Right now there is no easy way to identify duplicate companies unless we manually catch it and update the records. This causes all sorts of problems when we're attempting to send emails, for example using a current client list. Would be nice if there were a way to identify likely duplicates and merge them. 

clintonskakun
Teilnehmer/-in

@tamibrehse We just deployed some major upgrades (today in fact) to our fuzzy matching in Dedupely that should take care of those types of duplicates. I can't gaurentee it will work 100% but you could test it out with our 7 day free trial - https://dedupe.ly/hubspot

nikkiv
Stratege/Strategin

Is this functionality available in Beta? This is a big pain for us and we have 20K+ contacts. I have tried to clean it up manually but it takes way too much time. 

malcolmslater
Mitglied

Hi,

 

It looks like there's some companies here providing add-ins. We generally provide custom complex rule bulk deduping to public sector of 1m+ records, but would be happy to have a look if you want. It usually takes a few trial runs to refine the match rules.

Dylan
HubSpot-Produktteam

Hello HubSpot community - I wanted to re-illustrate that this tool is available from HubSpot in private beta. Currently, the beta supports contact duplicate identification. We hope to introduce companies duplicate identification in the coming weeks as well. 

 

If you are interested in becoming an early user - please fill out the beta form here. We will be in touch if you are a good fit.

 

Note: We will not be accepting every submission into the beta, we will reach out to submissions that are a good fit for the early version of the tool. 

Carly_Farlow
Mitwirkender/Mitwirkende

Does the beta tool in HubSpot work at contact level only? What about companies? We have a lot of duplicate companies bc domain wasn't assigned at one point with a Salesforce integration. Now that we no longer use Salesforce, I am auditing companies. It would be great to be able to have the dedup feature at the company level as well.