HubSpot Ideas

Yunhui

New feature: Bulk Merge for Duplicates

Yas, we've got the feature of manage duplicates that's great. One thought is there's no way to bulk merge of contact and company duplicates, and you'll need to go through one by one manually. 

 

I'm wondering if there's a better way for us instead of deduplicating one by one, which is literally unrealistic for enterprise users with mass contacts. In our case, we have 1890 duplicates for contacts, which requires going through 1890 times of deduplicates.

 

New feature request: Bulk Merge 

167 Replies
Duncxz
Participant

I hear the bulk merge feature is in planning - as hubspot says on this thread 

But Hubspot do we have any idea when it will be made available?

 

this is so necessary

 

insycle and deduply are options but very expensive addons for those with lots of contacts

 

the existing duplicate merge feature in hubspit (paid version) is only manual and can merge only one at a time which is just not practical - it's so slow

 

exporting and doing manually in spreadsheets i thought might be an option but how does one merge and retain the history. There is no control so to be effective it needs to be provided natively in hubspot.

 

Hubspot please provide a best guess as to when this might be implemented

i know from talking to a few people, like me, this is stopping me from upgrading to a paid plan and using your product suite. Thanks!

Msyvrais
Key Advisor

@Duncxz  Agreed, I was just researching Insycle because they can deduplicate across HubSpot and Salesforce simultaneously however its a full data management suit and at the price tag, it's just not realistic as we have all other data management under control and have no interest in changing again.
Knowing how far in the future this is planned would really help us judge how much more effort/energy we need to invest in to find a solution as we need one sooner than later.

 

Cheers,

Dedupely
Contributor

After seing a lot of companies with larger data sets unable to budget Dedupely, we sat down and thought hard about this. Mega-data sets doesn't automatically translate to mega-budget.

 

We want to be a helping hand, not a brick wall. 

 

So in light of not only the economical affects of COVID-19 but also to make Dedupely practically priced and accessible, we've SLASHED our prices for enterprise plans, also offering monthly plans.

 

To get more details on the new enterprise pricing please contact/chat us on the website

 

EDIT: Sorry, I posted broken links. Just updated them.

Msyvrais
Key Advisor

@Dedupely  Can you handle duplicates simultaneously across Hubspot and Salesforce yet? If not what timeline are you looking at?

Dedupely
Contributor

@Msyvrais At the moment we don't. Our Salesforce integration is still in security review. We're planning on having the simultaneous de-dupe between HS and SF ready within the next 2-3 months. In the meantime we can offer two accounts (one HS and one SF) for price of one.

neil2
Participant

Yes definitely need this feature.

ianleaman
HubSpot Product Team

Hey HubSpot community,

 

Our team has investigated this issue and decided not to work on this feature in the next quarter or two. We will revisit after that. Our current tool needs some work to be reliable before we can add new features (you may see some big reliability changes coming soon). 

 

We want to do bulk merge right and don't feel we are in a good position to do so at this current moment. Additionally, we have many app partners who can perform this service at higher volumes. I am happy to go into the logic more if you all have questions.

 

I personally have talked to many people experiencing this issue. Reliability concerns are just as big as bulk merge and I'm very hesitant to introduce a bad product experience around destructive actions. I don't believe that is the customer experience you all deserve. 

willerdmann
Member

But aren't your app partners paid?  It seems a bit lazy to rely on your partnerships to get something done in your own software.  Passing off the cost to clients, who in many cases have thousands of contacts, doesn't sit well with me.  Nor does going to a third party to get a feature which should be built into your system. 

 

It's funny, you don't have the resources to accomplish this task within the next few months, but you have no problem charging clients for overages.

 

Not impressed with this.  The status was in progress in May, now canned at the end of July?  Seems like you guys are kicking the can down the road and hoping nobody notices.

neil2
Participant

Could you add a search function to the merge tool? This would hugely help. I use this function mostly for identifying Salesforce sync errors due to duplicate rules.

ianleaman
HubSpot Product Team

Hi, @neil2 that's an interesting request. I just flagged it with the Salesforce Sync team. Is there a reason their dashboards can't help you solve that issue? 

 

@willerdmann I'm sorry you feel that way. The long response time to this issue is on me. If you want to discuss more I'm happy to set up some time to chat.

neil2
Participant

@ianleaman there is a bit of a bug that took me quite some time to figure out what the problem was. HubSpot notification on Salesforce sync on the Contact record shows the contact is not syncing to salesforce due to a duplicate rule.

 

This infers the problem is with Salesforce, and support told me a number of times in vain I tried to find the source of the rules in Salesforce but could find no reason (we have allow duplicates enables in Salesforce)

 

The issue was actually the HubSpot and the duplicate contact tool identifying duplicates and not allowing the sync. As soon as the two contacts were merged the synced fine.

 

So atm I have to open the contact with issue in HS and SF and check the email address.

 

I then need to find the duplicate searching through contacts.

 

I then go back to the contact that is already in SF and see which email is the primary.

 

Then I can merge the records.

 

A lot of clicks would be saved with a search function within duplicates. I can't seeing it be too much work to implement either as essentially it is just the contacts search function with a filter applied.

AndreaTinner
Participant

YES PLEASE! This would be really helpful!

azalaquett
Contributor

@ianleaman I completely understand the concerns around the bulk merge and the unintended consequences a feature like that could have. One thought would be, could HubSpot put together a Professional Service that uses a native bulk merge tool that first has the user input a series of if/then logic? The HubSpot Professional Service could verify the if/then logic is set up correctly, run a SAMPLE of (perhaps 20-30) records to see if anything wasn't caught and that the merge is happening as expected (in that 20-30 records, you'd want to include a use case for most common scenarios each...)

 

It just seems like there has to be some middle ground for HubSpot users who thousands of duplicates. Those duplicates impact reporting (if Marketing value is split between records and only 1 contact is associated with a deal or Oppty in SFDC)...etc. and I think it would be valuable to have this option. 

 

Thanks for your consideration and all of the thought I'm sure you've already probably put into this challenge!!

~Amanda 

ck2018
Participant

If you’re open to using an app from the App Marketplace, Insycle lets you define a set of rules for finding and then merging duplicates in bulk and automatically. You can run the process in “Preview” mode to make sure it works as expected before applying any changes. Here is a short merge duplicates video.

 

We just released Recipes which allows you to automate a series of data management tasks like deduplication, in the correct order, to fully cover all of the scenarios and simplify the process. 

 

And if you use Salesforce together with HubSpot, you can use Insycle to merge duplicate contacts and companies simultaneously across the CRMs - while the sync is active - and keep the merged records syncing. Here is an article: How to Merge Duplicates in HubSpot and Salesforce and Keep them Syncing.

 

hubspot-merge-duplicates-recipe.png

 

With the App Marketplace, you have many product teams working for you 😊 to complement, augment, and extend the HubSpot functionality and help you succeed. More than 500 teams actually… 

 

PS I’m from Insycle

DavidPeck
Member

Yes, it's ridiculous that this isn't even an option. At the very least, you should be able to select all the contacts that you want to merge from the main contact screen and merge from there. Having to go into each contact to merge is unnecessary and time consuming beyond measure. 

bryceanelson
Participant

For the love of all that is holy, please implement this.

jakesdekock
Participant

I also strongly want to upvote this development.  I just do not have the time to manually merge duplicates one by one and it is becoming a major issue for us

Rebecca93
Participant

Really needed - there needs to be some logic so you can manage a SCV database. 

Having to manually do this when historic records have got out of control and duplicates have been created via forms is crazy that it is manual. (It would save a lot of time! ) 

JCNunsys
Contributor | Elite Partner

Si por favor, estaría genial que lo habilitaran 

JCNunsys
Contributor | Elite Partner

Si por favor estaría genial que lo habilitaran