Currently, when merging contacts with different phone numbers, the phone number from the merged record overwrites the phone number from the retained record. I would prefer that both phone numbers are saved in the contact record, ideally within the "Phone Number" property.
I am aware that there have been several discussions in the forum about handling multiple phone numbers and that the best practice is to create custom properties of the "Phone Number" type.
However, this approach requires a lot of manual effort. For example, we frequently import lists of numerous contacts, each with multiple phone numbers because they are points of contact for different locations. Creating a separate property for each phone number is extremely labor-intensive.
It would be much simpler if these phone numbers could be stored within the contact record when merging contacts, similar to how multiple email addresses are already handled.
This is something that I have seen multiple times; it is definitely a common issue. Makes sense that people would not want to lose valuable phone number data, especially if they are not able to easily discern what the "correct" phone number to keep is.
Also wanted to mention that Insycle can help with this. For full disclosure, I work for Insycle.
But Insycle offers advanced data retention when merging, down to the field. level. For example, you could instruct Insycle to automatically keep the phone number when merging from the most recently created record, or perhaps the record that is associated with a deal, or something that signals that it the most likely to have the correct data.
Then, you can instruct Insycle to store all additional phone numbers in separate fields so that you can retain them. You could store them in all in one custom field, or potentially dump each unique phone number into its own field. This will happen automatically on the merge, so the only manual process there would be creating the field initially, and then creating your Insycle template. Insycle can also be injected into Workflows so that this deduplication happens immediately after a record is created.
Additionally, wanted to mention that you can set something like this up for any field in your database, not just phone numbers. So you can always ensure that you retain the data that you need.
Here is an article we published on our data retention when merging features that you might find helpful.
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