The default duplication rule on contacts (name + any of primary email, phone number or organization) does not really work for us, since we regularly update contacts from their submissions of registration forms. And people misspell their names surprisingly often.
They rarely misspell their email addresses though, because they know that's where confirmation emails and access links go. In addition, email addresses are usually unique identifiers for a person, so using the email addresses to identify duplicates (and merge contacts on import) seems only logical.
That's why we asked support to change the duplication rule for us and "the engineers" did our bidding.
Now, unfortunately, the result is not what I would expect:
- The duplication rule now only considers the primary email (i.e., the first email in the list of emails for a contact). So if someone uses an alternative email address, even if we know that address already, we still get duplicates and don't even know it.
- The duplication rule now considers all contacts without any email address as duplicates of one another. While I can see that technically "no email address" equals "no email address", on the semantical level, this is obviously nonsense. Nevertheless, these contacts now show tons of "duplicates" in their details and the "find duplicates" view is completely broken for us, showing hundreds of duplicate groups (of size between 5 and 50), each with some of the no-email-contacts. Support told me that all this is expected behavior and not a bug. The duplicate logic is "not good at dealing with large numbers of duplicates" they say.
Please Pipedrive. This is a core feature for data hygiene. Make it work properly.
And don't anyone dare suggesting we use Dupely or any other 3rd-party service to compensate for this.
