The duplicate strategy for CRMs

Enterprise software long existed without connections, but since the #martech era, integrations are not only necessary, but vital to any leading organization.

As with any new technology, we get new solutions to our old problems and also new problems we never dealt with before. For example, multiple integrations added a few complexities to our data flow sync, creating duplicates when there should be none.

So, the question may be, how do we handle duplicates from multiple CRMs?

The strategy: First and foremost, duplicate occurrences are not a software issue, they are a strategy issue. We must be able to devise a strategy that presents well the data in a unified form, taking advantage of what computers do really well: comparing 0s and 1s.

From our past experiences, we always recommend that customers choose a key which is unique but at the same time not sensitive. For example, we consider emails a smaller risk when comparing them to Social Security Numbers.

Our overall recommendation when choosing keys:

• unique and;
• not sensitive.

Sometimes, though, it is not possible to have unique keys in the process of collecting customer complaint data. Let's say for example that you want to collect lead current companies. There is not a public key and even if you want to use their Employer Identification Number (EIN), it doesn't make business sense to ask this on a sales contact form.

In these cases, we provide a software merger tool which allows different contacts to be merged. It is simple, but it requires that you match each duplicate by hand, which can be a time consuming task.

As an enterprise software company, we look to help our customer with their data integration flow, reviewing the best practices. Sometimes an upgrade your add to another system (beyond ours) on your stack may solve duplicates across your entire technology stack.

When we are talking about integrations, we are not limited to the software itself, but also our people, support and strategies.