You cannot “undo” a duplicate merge after it has been completed. Make sure the contacts should be merged before performing any duplicate merge.
Before using the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge feature, it is important that you understand the basics of InterAction and how InterAction processes duplicates. Information on this can be found in How Duplicate Merge Combines Data.
Using the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge feature, you can identify multiple duplicate contacts and merge them into one contact.
After you have opened the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge feature, you can group contacts, manipulate groups, and review the details for a contact.
Modifying the Selection of Contacts to Merge
There are two important ways you can modify the contacts to merge. These are the following:
- Selecting the “good” contact. This is the contact into which the other contacts will be merged.
- Adding and removing contacts from the list of contacts to be merged.
By default, the first contact listed, or if contacts are grouped, the first contact in the group will be selected as the “good” contact. In many cases, you will want to change this so that the good contact is the contact that has the most information, is used the most, or has some other important characteristic.
For information on the order in which contacts are merged, see How the Data is Merged Using Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge.
The grouping options will often group together contacts that are not actually duplicates. For example, if you choose the Last Name grouping option, you know that all people with the last name “Johnson” are not duplicates and should not be merged. You can do the following:
- Use the arrow buttons to add and remove contacts from the list of contacts to merge.
- Drag and drop contacts from the list of contacts not merged to a group of contacts to merge.
- Drag and drop contacts between groups.
[1] After you select a grouping option, contacts are organized into groups. Groups are separated by a horizontal line. The contact selected in each group is the contact into which all other contacts in that group are merged.
[2] You can add and remove contacts from groups by using the arrow buttons. To move contacts between groups, select the contact and drag it to the group to which you want it added.
What Happens if the Losing Contact Has Open Data Change Management Tickets?
At the end of the duplicate merge process, InterAction searches for all open Data Change Management tickets for the “losing” contact.
The following actions take place:
- All open Possible Duplicate tickets on the losing contact are automatically closed.
- All other open Data Change Management tickets on the losing contact display the following message: “The contact for which this ticket was originally created has been merged. Any updates will be applied to the merged contact.”
- InterAction updates the contact IDs to point to the new contact.
Merge Contacts
- Log on to InterAction as a user with data quality permissions.
- Open the folder in which you want to find and merge duplicate contacts.
- Instead of opening a folder, you can run a search or a find.
- You can also select a sub-set of contacts. For example, in a large folder use the letter bar to select only the contacts with names that begin with “C.”
- You can Mark contacts to use instead of using an entire folder or search results.
- Choose Data Quality > Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge.
- Within the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge dialog box, you can do the following:
- To group person contacts, choose Group by People, and select which option you want to Group People by Matching.
- To group company contacts, choose Group by Company, and then select which option you want to Group Companies by Matching.
- To review contact details, select the contact in the grid view and the details will appear in the summary area. Select the Folder button to view information about the folders that contain the contact.
- Add or remove contacts to the list of Contacts to Merge by doing the following:
- To add a contact to the list, select the contact and choose the
arrow button.
- To add a contact to a group or to move contacts between groups, select the contact from either list and drag it to the group to which you want it added.
- To remove a contact from the list, select the contact and choose the
arrow button.
- To add a contact to the list, select the contact and choose the
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Select the contact into which you want the other contacts in the group to be merged by selecting the radio button for that contact.
You can set the order in which the contacts will be merged by dragging the contacts up and down the list within the group. Contacts will be merged in the order in which they are listed. For more information, see How the Data is Merged Using Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge.
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To print a record of the contacts that you will be merging, choose Print. This prints a list of the contacts listed in the Contacts to Merge list.
There are several ways to maintain a record of the changes made by InterAction when merging duplicate contacts. For more information, see Monitoring Changes Made Using Data Quality Features.
- To merge contacts in the Contacts to Merge list do the following:
- Choose Merge Group to merge the contacts. If contacts are grouped, this merges the selected group of contacts.
- Choose Merge All Groups to merge all of the grouped contacts listed in the Contacts to Merge list into their groups. This button only appears if you have grouped contacts.
How the Data is Merged Using Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge
When contacts are merged, they are actually merged two at a time, for example, if you are merging three contacts into one. The second contact is merged into the first contact, then the third contact is merged into the first contact. The order in which the contacts are listed in the Confirm merge dialog box is the order they will be merged. You can rearrange this order in the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge dialog box by dragging and dropping the contacts into the correct order. Regardless of order, the contact with the selected radio button is the contact into which all other contacts in the group are merged.
Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge Example
In the example below, contact (#1) represents the contact whose radio button is selected in the dialog box. This contact always "wins" when merging contact data. The second contact that is listed in the Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge dialog box is the second contact merged (#2).
This contact's data completes any fields that are not already recorded on the good contact, however it does not replace data. Notice that the name on the merged contact is Jane not Jayne.
The third contact (#3) completes any other fields that have not already been filled by the first two contacts. However it does not overwrite information from the first two contacts. Notice that Vice President does not overwrite President on the merged contact. Therefore, the order in which you merge contacts does matter. If the second and third contacts were switched, the merged version of Jane would show her as the Vice President of TeleNorth instead of the President!
Managing the Merge Order
For information on how each piece of information is merged, see How Multi-Contact Duplicate Merge Combines Data.