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.

HubSpot Updates
July 30, 2019 06:02 PM

Hi Daniel -- I've reached out to schedule a call for us. Thanks again

July 30, 2019 05:26 PM

Hi folks -- thank you for all of the continued feedback on the duplicate management tool! We're thrilled that this has been as useful as we'd hoped to help businesses keep their data as clean to take advantage of a unified customer database for marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

 

We're proud to build an open platform to support our integration partners like Dedupely and Insycle. While our partner products can deliver differentiated value, the native duplicate management tool is developed entirely by HubSpot.

 

How we identify potential duplicates: Under the hood, this tool uses machine learning (ML) to identify contacts and companies that you are likely to merge. At its core, ML helps automate tasks by analyzing examples of a task to evalutate new tasks to complete. In the case of duplicate management, the task is merging contacts. By analysing past merges, ML algorithms identify other pairs of contacts that have a high likelihood of being merged based on your behavior, which are shown to you in the duplicate management tool.

Today, the ML models for contact and company merge suggestions are based on contact and company properties including name, email, phone number, company name, company industry (determined by HubSpot Insights), and company industry (determined by HubSpot Insights). We plan to expand the properties that the ML models consider to other properties, but to be transparent, we're more likely to add default contact properties (e.g. contact activity data) before custom portal properties in the near term.

 

Because this is a machine learning product, it doesn't rely on strict rules like exact matches phone number or name; by not relying on rules, the duplicate suggestions can more closely mimic our own human understanding of challenges like several contacts with the same business phone number or several contacts with the same generic name, like Kevin Smiley Happy.  As you merge and dismiss pairs, you provide feedback to the tool to help improve the accuracy of our merge recommendations based on patterns in the contact and company properties.

 

This tool is still under active development, and you should expect improvements around both the accuracy of the suggested merges and the merge experience throughout the rest of the year. 

July 12, 2019 02:33 PM

Thank you! We're proud to be building an all-on-one platform to allow businesses to combine HubSpot's suite of tools with their choice of powerful integrations, like Dedupely. It takes a village to keep CRM data clean to enable millons of businesses to grow better. 

- Kevin Walsh (senior product manager @ HubSpot)

June 13, 2019 03:29 PM

Thank you so much @ck2018 ! We appreciate the kind words, and we appreciate being able to work with great, value adding partners like Insycle. We're eager to continue building a strong, loveable platform for engineering teams like Insycle to help us help millions of buisnesses grow better.

 

- Kevin Walsh (senior product manager @ HubSpot)

Delivered
June 12, 2019 04:49 AM

Hi HubSpot Community,


Thank you all for the continued feedback on this post. The continued insights into tools needed to help your businesses grow better is exactly what we need to build great products. 

Today, I'm excited to let you know that you’ve got a brand new tool that finds duplicate contact and company data in HubSpot. No extra spreadsheets, tools, or costs. So you’ll be more efficient, and your customers will have more frictionless experiences with your brand. This tool is now available for all professional and enterprise customers - full details on how to use it can be found in this knowledge article


This product leverages machine learning to consider data such as name, email(s), IP-derived country, phone number, zip code, and company name when comparing two objects. When you accept (merge) or reject (dismiss) a pair as duplicates, you’re providing feedback to the model to help it improve over time. We're likely to add more data to the model in the future.

 
Again, thank you all for your continued feedback on this idea. Your use-cases, examples, and urgency help us build better products. Happy deduping! 

April 14, 2019 06:32 AM

Hi all -- We're excited that we're getting closer to being able to release the new tool to all customers. We're working to scale its processing, so that it works for everyone, including customers with large numbers of contacts. 

 

The link in BB1's post will only work if your portal has been accepted into the beta program. 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.

 

We won't be accepting every submission into the beta, but we will reach out to submissions that are a good fit for the early version of the tool.

 

Thank you

January 08, 2019 04:47 AM

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. 

Re: More efficient way to find and merge duplicate contacts - changed to: In Beta
November 20, 2018 11:35 AM

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.  

October 29, 2018 12:08 PM

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

Re: More efficient way to find and merge duplicate contacts - changed to: In Planning
October 29, 2018 11:45 AM

Hi HubSpot community, 

This is something the Product and Engineering team is beginning to research and plan, we hope to deliver a solution in the coming months. 

Investigating
April 03, 2017 10:53 AM

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.

143 Replies
AndreaTinner
Participant

also, the possibility for multi-select contacts/companies to merge. If there is any beta, please let me know and happy to test and participate.

Msyvrais
Key Advisor

@Dylan Can we take this one step higher and offer duplicate flags with the ability to review and merge within the actual contact record as well? 

Msyvrais
Key Advisor

I saw this within user defaults. This would be great if we can assign that notification to one person and not the contact owner. Exmple our salesforce does not use HS, I manage our data currently and it would be immensely helpful to get a notification if a potential duplicate was identified on the fly. 

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