Merge Tool Guide

How to use the Contact Merge Tool on Administrate

 The purpose of this document is to provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to Merge your duplicate Contacts into a single Contact. This is considered best practices for the following reasons:

• You cannot delete Contacts that have outstanding invoices or are booked on current Events.
• Having multiple Contacts in your CRM for the same Contact leads to confusion and issues with your data, especially when it comes to reporting and workflows of booking a Contact onto an Event.
• Using the Contact Merge Tool, allows you to take invoices, bookings and past Events that exists on each of these individual Contact records and Merge them into a single Contact.
  • If you have 3 duplicate Contacts that you have booked in the past onto Events, once you Merge them, the new single Contact record will still contain the aggregated Event history under the Contact record, so you can keep track.

Step 1: Navigate to “Potential Contact Duplicates”

• Navigate to the Control Panel 
• Search for, or scroll and find, “Potential Contact Duplicates” under the CRM section.

Step 2: Identify your duplicates using the table

• You will now see a list of “Potential Contact Duplicates” aggregated into a single list. This list has multiple pages so be sure to advance the pages when navigating this list.
• The list identifies a single conflict and the reason. The left column is a Contact record and the right column is the Contact record it conflicts with.
• Click on a row in the table and you will see three options, to Merge or to view one of the two Contacts.
  • If you wanted to view the Contact record, click on one and you will navigate to that specific Contact record.
• Click on “Merge”.

Step 3: Navigate to Merge screen

• You will now see a table with information from one Contact record listed on the left and from the other listed on the right.
  • To navigate to a Contact record from this screen, just click on the Name and ID number in blue at the top of each column.
• The central column entitled “Merged” refers to the information that will show up on the Contact record once you have clicked the “Merge” button in the top right of the screen.
  • If the same information is used in the left hand and right can column, then neither will be highlighted as it effectively does not matter which you select because there is no conflict on this part of the contact records.
  • The green highlighted rows will show conflicts and the system by default will select one or the other if both have something filled in that field.
  • If there is information filled in one, and not the other, then the system will automatically highlight that field.

Step 4: Create new merged Contact

• Go through the rows that are highlighted in green one-by-one.
• If you want to change the highlighted field for a specific area (and therefore what will show on the new merged contact), then simply click on the opposite ‘box’.
  • Once you have done this, the box will become highlighted and the opposing box will become un-highlighted (de-selected).
• Scroll down and repeat this process until the central column reflects the information that you want to show on the Merged Contact record.
• If you scroll to the bottom you will also see other Contact related information, such as Event attended, you will see the result in the middle once the Contacts are Merged
  • In the screenshot you can see that, as a Student, this Contact attended one Event on the right, but the left-hand contact didn’t attend an Event, so the merge will bring that existing event history over to the merged contact.
• Once you are happy with the information presented, click on the “Merge” button on the top right.
• Once you have clicked the “Merge” button, click OK and you have now Merged the Contact and resolved the duplication of the Contact.
• Repeat this process until all duplications have been reconciled.

Good-To-Know

• Once all the duplicates have been reconciled, that duplicate will no longer show up on the list of duplications as you have resolved them.
  • You can double check this by searching for “Carol Côté” on your instance, only one Contact should show up (as opposed to 4 listed under the same name before).
• This process does not create a new Contact ID number, the new Merged Contact ID number will become the newer number. ID are sequential so the higher the number, the newer it is (in other words the most recently created of the two contact records in question).