I just tried the Merge Duplicates and it didn’t list contacts based on first and last name. I got 5 contacts listed, all different names.

Wonder how Merge actually works? Can someone explain what is happening under the hood here?

Best,

Ronald Lee
http://www.elevatedmarketing.ca
604-781-7093 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
...follow us on twitter! http://twitter.com/ElevatedMarket

I would also like to know more about merging duplicates as it has not always worked as I expected

I’m dying for a manual merge - in addition to the automatic.  I’ve had two issues:

CONTACT MERGE
1) When I click, Merge Duplicates…(I do have >19k contacts), it says this may take a few minutes…but I check literally 6 HOURS later and it’s still saying that…so I bail.  I’d love for this to work, but would be OK with the following

COMPANY -ENTITY MERGE
2) Many times people have entered (multiple account names, example: University of Washington, Univ of WA).  I’d LOVE to check their boxes, and click a merge button…  be given the choice to choose which one to keep as parent data, and bring the contacts/activities back into the new/parent company/contact.

+1 vote up for me

I second Brant’s motion!

Brant - Sep 20, 2010 06:24pm

I’m dying for a manual merge - in addition to the automatic.  I’ve had two issues:

COMPANY -ENTITY MERGE
2) Many times people have entered (multiple account names, example: University of Washington, Univ of WA).  I’d LOVE to check their boxes, and click a merge button…  be given the choice to choose which one to keep as parent data, and bring the contacts/activities back into the new/parent company/contact.

dpt - May 03, 2010 02:50am

The Merge Duplicates feature is based on having the same first and last name.  I would like to have the option of merging by Business Email address, or ideally by Business Email OR Personal Email.  This would be useful if I had, for instance, a Will Sample and a William Sample (same guy) in my CRM and both records had the same email address.

I have the same problem(and opinion), that the merge function should check EMAILS as well. This is the most common value to have as unique in i a contact db.

The best should be if you were able to decide which field should be used for merging.

I wrote to the support about this for several days ago so I’m looking forward to an answer any day now…

Has anyone heard back about this merge duplicates request?

Yes, the Merge Duplicates works like this: If both first name and last name is equal, they will be merge. No other options availible or on it’s way.

To find duplicate email, I export the data and look for duplicate in Excel.

We’ve run into problems with this. We would like to see more control on any sort of contacts being merged.  Some of our contacts, different people with same first and last name, have been merged into one, thereby contaminating those contacts.  Also, old information has been merged with new information from lists being imported.  It would be great for duplicates to be flagged and we have an option of a manual override.

Is there anything in the future to address this?

I also agree with the previous posters in that we should have an email address as the unique identifier.

+1 vote up for me too