Duplication Rule on Email is Broken
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.
Comments
-
Hi @Sven Amann_76110 , thank you for your feedback! I appreciate that Dedupely may not be your ideal solution; both users and our support team often recommend it because it is one of the most popular apps listed on our marketplace, and the creators of the tool specialize in data duplication prevention.
This kind of detailed data duplication ability is not in the plans for the very near future in Pipedrive, but I have made sure your feedback is seen by our development team for further research :)
0 -
Thank @Manuel Oliveira, for coming back to this. I don’t ask for fancy deduplication features, although there’s certainly room for improvement without going for fancy… I would be content with basic abilities that work consistently and in a sensible way. Resolving the two concrete issues I mentioned above would go a long way!
1 -
Hey @Sven Amann_76110, not sure if this is still a problem for you, it's been awhile since you posted this, but wanted to share.
I was surprised to find that it considers contacts with no email as duplicates, using the email as the primary deduplication matching field. That doesn't seem intended.
But yes, generally, having more control around deduplication would be super helpful.
I also wanted to mention that Insycle (and full disclosure, I work for them) could help you to bulk merge with custom rules for identifying duplicates. Use any Pipedrive field as a potential matching field and use exact or similar matching. For now, Insycle only considers the primary email address as well, but we are aware that the functionality to match across all available emails is needed and it's on our roadmap.
You also have full control over the resulting merged master record, down to setting rules for retaining data on a field-by-field basis. For example, you could instruct Insycle to keep the Job Title field from the record with the most recent activity, most recent email opens, or even keep the job title field based on lead status (such as keeping the job title field for anyone that is labeled as a Customer in your system).
Hope that helps!
0
