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からのアップデート
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 スマイリー ハッピー.  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)

ステータスに更新: 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. 

ステータスに更新: 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件のコメント
FlywheelKinetic
投稿者 | Elite Partner

I'm not sure if you think that you have solved for this request by building a fuction for merging two records and building a function for allowing contacts to have multiple email addresses. However, this issue is not resolved. It should not be difficult to build an alogorithm and report that searches for "likely" duplicates. I would like to be able to add custom properties to a list of properties that it looks at. 

 

For example. Perhaps the default properties an algorithm could consider would be first name, last name, phone number, mobile phone number, address, IP address, and email address. I would also like to add custom properties to the list for consideration like loyalty number, club membership number, and contact properties for record IDs from imports from other systems. I'd like to see a list of two contacts that the system says look similar with an option to merge or ignore. If I select merge I'd like to be taken to the merge screen popup for confirmation. If I select ignore I'd like those two names to be removed from the list and remembered as being not equal.

 

This would be INCREDIBLY helpful.

danjimmerson
メンバー

@seobrien - Can you please provide an update to the status of this request?

RachelCarollo
メンバー

We also need this functionality in order to efficiently use the Hubspot CRM. We pitch and work with companies and contacts that don't have email addresses (e.g. Floral Managers in grocery stores). We need to be able to de-dupe on their names, companies, addresses and or/phone numbers. 

jmihaljevic
メンバー

I feel for everyone here as I've had the same headache for months.  I want to offer a glimmer of hope: It seems that a third-party provider will have a solution for this some time this year: https://dedupe.ly/integrations/hubspot

ron_kagan
投稿者

I want to give my full-throated endorsement of the need for this

 

Julianek
メンバー

Agree this would be very helpful... 

CRM6300
参加者

IS there any update on this? It is extremely necessary.

JerryReid
投稿者

After we integrated Salesforce CRM with HubSpot, we had to manage our duplicates in Salesforce better. After successfully removing 100% of duplicates in our CRM and switching to a contacts having multiple accounts in Salesforce data model, we were still left with 2000+ duplicate contacts in a 60K database. This has led to syncing issues. We're now having to go through a list of 2000 records and manually click to merge each one of them from the old email address/secondary email address on a dupe contact in HubSpot to the primary currently referenced/syncing in HubSpot to a primary contact.  Just being able to run a process daily like via a smart list of potential dupes group based on some search pattern of first and last name for example, could allow us to bulk analyze and merge many dupes.

pauleastasia
参加者

After a very good first impression of this CRM, the inability to easily either ignore, remove or merge duplicates has stopped my evaluation of the system in its tracks. Having this function available at either import; and especially in the contacts and companies lists is very important, perhaps critical. 

dstemo
参加者

Any update on this? Doing my quarterly duplicate pull and having a painful reminder of how tedious this is with HubSpot. Please, this has been "in planning" for over a year, can we at least get an update on where this feature is in the pipeline? 

ck2018
参加者

Yes, I work for this company, but, hey, if it can help someone here, I'm willing to try:

 

I'm from Insycle and we're a HubSpot Certified Connect Partner. We developed a tool that surfaces duplicates by any field and provides flexible way to merge them. Think it can help with some of your pains.

 

Last week we published a guest post on HubSpot blog that you may find interesting: Data Duplication and HubSpot: Dealing With Duplicates and the Impact They Have on Your Business

 

Don't hate on us before you try 🙂

RiccardoPisani
トップ投稿者

Thanks for sharing, I'll check this out!

 

Kind regards

Gretchen
参加者 | Platinum Partner

What's the status of this?

VagaeNatus
キーアドバイザー

My team and I removed more than 10k duplicates in Groupon's CRM using the following method. We did that out of the CRM.  I believe Hubspot should build a solution that does something similar but directly within the system, like some Salesforce plugins are doing.

 

1/ Dealing with "exact match" duplicates

- Hubspot is currently making sure the email is unique at each contact creation.

--> Hubspot should do exactly the same for phone number.

 

2/ Dealing with "close match" duplicates

These are contacts pretty similar, in names, emails, phones, etc. For this, there is only one solution: to use fuzzy match. Hubspot should fuzzy match contact constantly, on various properties. It should be presented in 2 screens:

- 1st screen: all close match

- 2nd screen: close match to be checked. It's then up to the admin (or his team) to review that and for each pair to "Pass" it or to "Merge" it.

 

Adrien

 

AdamTulip
メンバー

We have reference numbers on our raw data list prior to import as our old CRM was able to identify these against what was already uploaded and update the details on the contact with the same reference as whats on the import. That Hubspot doesn't do this is narrowminded as most other CRM systems we use do!

tankney
参加者

So far I have seen two third-party companies that have already created a solution to this problem through an integration to Hubspot.  How is it that Hubspot themselves cannot solve this problem?

CRM6300
参加者

It is crazy, we really need this feature in HS. The third parties tools are a pain to use.

BrittG
メンバー

This would be great if HubSpot added a feature like this! My account has over 6,000 companies in the database, and I am estimating about half of them are duplicates. It would take too much time to search and do this manually so hopefully this will become a Beta soon!

ステータスに更新: In Planning
Dylan
HubSpot製品開発チーム

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. 

jakekirsch
参加者

Great News!

 

I've been using incycle, they recently came out with a tool to bulk merge based on properties. Deduply claims to have a solution coming really soon as well.

 

In a perfect world, HubSpot would use the stored cookie data to help indentify potential duplicates.