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
Dylan
HubSpot Product Team

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
Participant

@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
Participant

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
Contributor

Still in planning? Arghh!  😞

Dylan
HubSpot Product Team

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
Participant

sorry had to edit and canrt find out how to delete

jebacka
Member

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
Participant

@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
Member

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

 

Thanks,

Julia

clintonskakun
Participant

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

clintonskakun
Participant

@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
Member

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
Member

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
Participant

@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
Member

 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
Participant

@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
Top Contributor

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
Member

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 Product Team

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
Contributor

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.