Merging Duplicate Contacts

If you have duplicate contact records in your database, IXACT Contact gives you the ability to easily identify and merge those duplicates. You can either have the system search for duplicates across your entire database for you, or you can identify duplicates yourself using List View.

Only the Team Leader and administrators can use the Merge Duplicate Contacts feature..

Let the system find duplicates for you

To have the system intelligently identify duplicates in your database for you, start by clicking the Utilities icon in the secondary menu (top right of the screen) and select the Merge Duplicate Contacts tab.

Note When checking for duplicates, the system only includes contacts that have been accepted into your database. It does not include “pending” contacts in the Imported and Synchronized Contacts list in the main Utilities page. (These contacts are identified as duplicates with an asterisk in the first column if they match a contact in your database on name and/or email address.) If you wish to merge a contact in this list using the Merge Duplicate Contacts feature, you must first accept the contact into your database.

You first must decide the criteria by which you want the system to automatically identify duplicate contacts in your database. You have the following options:

  • Name – Exact match on main contact first and last name
  • Email – Match on at least one main contact email address
  • Phone – Match on at least one main contact mobile or home phone number – this ignores special characters found in phone numbers (i.e., (, ), -)
  • Exact Match – Match on name and email address and phone number – includes contacts where these fields are blank on all records

Once you have selected your desired matching criteria, click Find Duplicates.

The system will return one or more “Groups” of duplicates. Each Group includes two or more matching contacts. Key data points are displayed for each contact record in order to help you decide which contact record to keep (or merge into), and which contact record or records to delete (or merge from). Each Group includes the following options before merging your contacts:

  • If you do not wish to merge a Group at all, click the plus/minus toggle at the top left of the Group to hide its details.
  • The “Master” contact record is the contact record that will be kept (or merged into) when you merge a Group. The Master record initially appears at the top of each Group, and defaults to the contact record that was added to your database first. You can change the Master record by clicking Set As Master next to another contact record that you wish to set a the master.
  • If a Group includes more than two contact records and you do not wish to include a contact in the merge, you can exclude it by selecting Exclude for the Include/Exclude toggle. Note that to merge a Group, at least one contact other than the Master must be set to Include.

When you merge a group of contacts, the following “merge rules” are applied:

  • INCLUDED CONTACTS NOT SET AS THE MASTER WILL BE DELETED FROM YOUR DATABASE. While these contacts will be stored in your Recycle Bin and can be restored, all activities for the contacts will be deactivated and unassigned, and all tasks and calendar appointments for the contacts will be permanently deleted. (For more information about deleting and restoring contacts, see Deleting Contacts.)
  • Only information from the Contact Profile page is merged. All other information and activities for the non-master contact records is not merged.
  • Each Contact Profile field on the master record is only updated if the field is blank on the master record and not blank on one of the non-master records.
  • Non-matching phone numbers and email addresses from non-master contact records will be added to the master contact.
  • Additional contact Groups from the non-master record will be added to the master record.
  • Household Members are not updated.
  • If any contact in a group has unsubscribed from mass emails, then the master contact record will be set to not Accept Mass Emails.

The team member visibility on the master record is not updated.

When you are absolutely sure that you have set the desired options for a group, click Merge .

Once a group of contacts is merged, it will disappear from the list of groups, and you can move onto the next group.

Identifying duplicates yourself using List View

If you know that two or more contacts in your database are duplicates, you can identify them yourself using List View (see Using List View). Once you have selected your contacts, select the Merge Duplicates option from the Select Action list.

Your selected contacts are returned to one merge “Group”. You can use the same options described above to set your merge options for the group. When you are ready to merge your contacts, click Merge.