I am going to show you a method I used recently, when we had to sort out a number of contacts with duplicate phone numbers to prevent calling the same people twice. The SDR's were already calling prospects, and the matter of removing duplicate phone numbers form the calling list was urgent.
In this solution, I will show you how to:
- Set up a new association label for associating duplicates
- Automatically associate contacts with a matching property value of an identifier
- Create a rollup to count how many duplicates are associated to a record
- Create lists of duplicates to easily access and manage them
Details about the case:
This solution will work for any record type with any identifier, but in this article, I will use contact records with an identical phone number as the example case.
Setting up association labels for duplicate records
First, go to your settings -> Data Management -> Objects -> Contacts -> and open the tab "Associations". It should look something like this. Make sure you have "Contacts-to-Contacts" selected before you click the orange button to create a new association label.
Set an appropriate name for your duplicates to separate them from other potential association types you have in your portal. I'll just use "Duplicate" here.
Make sure you select "Many" so contacts can have more than one duplicate associated.
And there you go. You have set up an association so contacts can be labeled as duplicates to other contact records.
Automatically associating contacts with the same phone number
Set up a new workflow to associate the contacts. Setting the contacts to enroll when your identifying property is "known" and allowing re-enrollment will make the automation run again if the property is updated later.
Keep in mind that changing the phone number will not remove the duplicates that are already tagged.
Create associations based on "Matching property values" and make sure it looks like the image above.
Now turn on your workflow, and associations will be created automatically. Make sure you choose to enroll existing contacts if you want all you contacts to be enrolled instead of just new contacts created after the workflow is turned on.
Calculating number of duplicates
Creating a rollup to count how many duplicates are associated to a contact will help you create a list or include these in reports later.
Go to your property settings, and create a new property of type "Rollup"
You can replicate the set-up from this image to make sure you are counting the correct records.
Set up an active list of duplicate records
You can now set up an active list to get an overview of all records that have a duplicate. Simply set the filter to be "Associated duplicates" (The rollup property you just created) is greater than or equal to 1.
It should look something like this:
Now you can open any contact to see all the associated duplicates in the record view, or you can sort this list by phone number to see all the duplicated contacts next to each other.
Now before you go crazy and delete every one of these records, take a breath! 💨
Remember that for every series of records with the same phone number, you probably want to keep at least one of them. Make sure you understand where the duplicates are coming from in your CRM before you delete them. Could several employees for example be registered with a company's shared phone number? In that case, should they be deleted, or maybe just the phone number should be cleared?
