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.