Handling duplicate customer records

Does anyone know how to

  1. try and avoid duplicate customer records being created
  2. if they have a way of merging records if a duplicate has been created

Thank you

Good Afternoon Mihiri,

We attempt to avoid duplicate entries in several different ways.

  1. Engineer the user to search for a user first before permitting an addition.
  2. Enforce uniqueness on common keys such as email address or mobile number.
  3. Use callback validation to warn of the existence of a matching record.

Merging Duplicate Records:
Every Create deployment is slightly different and the data to be merged differs from customer to customer. Some systems will tolerate duplicates without causing any operational issues, while others it can cause confusion. If you have a particular use-case you’d like to discuss we can plan a route forward for you.


To add to what Adam has said we do all of the above, but due to how complicated contact merging is we’ve gone with reindexing against the better contact and deleting the duplicate. We also have subsets/composites and rules set up to highlight potential duplicates easier.

When creating a new contact internally, our build advisor helped us set up a page that would check for matching details on the system and display possible matches to the user before making them tick an override button to continue in creating a new contact.