Keeping your contact database clean and free from "Duplicates" is one of the most important tasks in managing an ERM database.
In order to provide the correct history of any past engagement with your contacts its essential to have a single reference to that contact. Every person is unique right? So (generally**) lets keep it that way!
A Contact 'KEY'.
A really important term to understand when working with contacts is the "contact-key". This is a unique identifier that represents each contact. There are 2 approaches here.
CRM integration
Your contacts are sourced or passed to us from a large internal CRM like Sales force or Microsoft Dynamics.
In this case its likely your CRM already has the KEY for each contact and is simply passed to us. Its normally a really long number or string like "12424xr3r490*hj".
Thus its always unique. In this case if we force use of the primary CRM KEY we should be fine.
Event Hub is your Contact CRM
Many CRM systems use email address as the key. At Event Hub we have chosen NOT to do this. We see many cases where emails are used and they are for different people. Examples Include;
Admin assistants who might manage a complete mangement team.
Sporting team managers who might represent the sporting team.
Individuals who might represent multiple organisations.
Thus, Event Hub has taken the position that a Contact is unique where;
firstName + Surname + emailaddress
is different.
Lets look at some examples that will help explain.
Jenny Jones jjones@company.com.au
John Jones jjones@company.com.au
If we use Email as the key - we would reject. But if we use both names and email we see its OK and correctly - we end up with 2 contacts.
Another example.
Robert Mcquade rob@eventhub.com.au
Rob Mcquade robert@eventhub.com.au
The above example is a good one. It will NOT be rejected. We will create a duplicate contact for the same person. We've even done this here at Event Hub!
Hence we supply a report to show you a list of possible duplicates. This report lists the same Surname and Email. You can thus determine if they are duplicates or not.
This area is tricky but is important - if you need some help in updating or further examples we are happy to help. Just start a CHAT session.
Cheers!
Scott.
*** Sometimes a individual might want to be same person but work for 2 companies - but keep the same email ?! Agents sometimes do this. If you see this or think is a use case you need to solve let us know...