What is a CRM duplicate contact?
In a CRM, a duplicate is a contact or company record, which exists several times with more or less the same information. Duplicates, triplicates (and more 😱) are often created for several reasons :
- By inattention
- In case of addition by several team members
- In case of importing contact lists without prior verification
- Duplicates related to automations created with tools like Zapier, Make or even n8n.
Duplicates created manually
It's not surprising: human error is common when entering data. Your team members can enter leads or companies already in your CRM without realizing it, and on top of that... generate duplicates 🥶
The first problem that arises then: individually, each member is likely to contact the same people multiple times. This is an obvious loss of credibility for your brand.
In the case of manual data entry or import, it is possible to minimize the risks:
- By checking in your CRM if the company or the contact already exists.
- By being attentive to input errors: inversion of the first and last names of the contact, typing errors in the input of the email, adding the personal email instead of the professional email, abbreviation of the company name...
- By checking that the data in the .csv or .xls import is correct. The import of a database acquired through a partnership or an event may contain duplicates. Moreover, databases purchased on the internet are rarely up to date (in addition, the purchase of databases is prohibited by the RGPD... we talk about it in this article.
The main causes of manual duplicates are therefore mainly the lack of time, as well as the lack of knowledge about duplicate management tools.
Duplicates generated by registrations and integrations
Another example of duplicate generation is forms. If a contact form on your website automatically creates a contact/company record in your CRM, your leads simply :
- Fill out the same form several times with different information,
- Make mistakes in the company name,
- Fill in their professional email, then their personal email during a second registration,
- Reverse their first and last names on an English form (common confusion of "first name" / "last name").
So many opportunities to create unwanted duplicates! 😢
The impact of duplicates on your sales and marketing efforts
Tarnished brand reputation
Your customers and prospects will quickly become frustrated with repeated or inconsistent communications, which can damage your brand reputation. And in your CRM, your KPIs will be impacted by duplicates:
- Planning a cold email campaign? Beware of duplicate contacts, wrong email addresses, inversions in the contact form fields, which can significantly increase your bounce rate.
- In case of undelivered emails, hard bounces, soft bounces... There is no doubt that the data in your CRM is not structured. You need to fix it by merging and updating duplicate information.
👉 Manually, this is a (too) tedious and time-consuming operation, hence the interest in using an automatic duplicate management solution.
A lack of credibility with your brand's prospects and customers
Duplicates hinder the ability to obtain a complete and accurate view of each contact record:
- History issues: a prospect that exists in multiple copies in your CRM will be contacted multiple times - because the conversation history is only available on one contact record.
- Segmentation issues: one version of a contact with country, one version of the same contact with activity sector. These two records will end up in different lists. Potentially, the contact will receive your newsletter twice.
Duplicate management tools integrated into your CRM
Some CRMs, such as HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho, have a function to detect duplicates and then merge them manually. In addition, there are duplicate management tools integrated to most CRMs, including :
Dropcontact: The duplicate management solution for your CRM
Native integration in your CRM
Dropcontact integrates natively with Pipedrive, HubSpot and Salesforce.
The integration is totally transparent: once connected to your CRM, Dropcontact takes care of duplicate management.
Accurate detection of duplicates
Dropcontact uses powerful proprietary algorithms to identify duplicates within your CRM, even if the properties of one contact are different from another.
Automatic data merge
Once duplicates are detected, Dropcontact automatically merges the data, always keeping the most up-to-date information and not deleting any information!
Real time synchronization
Your CRM data is continuously updated in real time with Dropcontact.
Dropcontact also prevents the creation of new duplicates and will instantly merge the two records concerned.
All Dropcontact features
Dropcontact automatically manages duplicates in your CRM... And more!
- Enrich your CRM data: updated professional email, professional phone number, LinkedIn profile, business sector, website, postal address, VAT, Siren,
- Validation and qualification of email addresses
- Correction of emails in case of input errors
- Standardization of data: inversion of name/first name, addition of capital letters, etc.
- Recovery of email signatures in order to complete your CRM contact sheets
💡 Dropcontact is the only 100% RGPD compliant solution: it does not rely on any database, guarantees the confidentiality of your data and delivers up-to-date information!
Dedupely
Dedupely is a platform for managing duplicates in your CRM. It allows you to scan your data to identify potential duplicates from contact/company records and similar information. You can also create your own duplicate detection and duplicate merging rules according to the problems identified in your CRM.
Dedupely works according to a credit system: if you exceed your credits before the end of the month, you will not be able to use it anymore without any additional cost. Credits are not carried over from one month to the next.
Dedupely integrates natively with CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive. The management of duplicates is done on the Dedupely interface and not in your CRM. On the other hand, the major disadvantage of this solution is that once the duplicates are merged, you will not be able to go back.
Discover the Dedupely VS Dropcontact comparison
Insycle
Insycle is a tool that offers many features such as automatic duplicate detection, but also the creation of duplicate detection and merging rules. You will also be able to identify incomplete and/or erroneous data within your CRM from the Insycle interface. Finally, it is possible to schedule automatic duplicate scans and merges on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis at your convenience.
However, when you install Insycle, you will need to set up duplicate detection and merge rules, which is a lot of configuration.
Native duplicate management functionality in HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho CRMs
HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho CRMs offer an integrated duplicate management feature. This feature allows you to identify certain duplicates based on the following criteria:
- Same last name/first name
- Same email address on two records (even if the rest of the information differs!)
- Same company
- Same postal address (if there are 2 company records)
On the other hand, this functionality does not always operate autonomously and sometimes requires actions on your part:
1. Preview the list of identified duplicates
2. Select and merge the duplicates by choosing the information that seems most up-to-date.
