Site And Contact Merge Tools in Dovetail Agent
Dovetail Agent v.4.1 has been expanded to include two tools to merge duplicate sites and contacts.
Before Dovetail Agent v.4.1, this functionality was available as Clarify Classic Client extension known as fcMerge, which is still available as a separate product. While fcMerge is also capable of handling duplicate address, part, and employee records, Dovetail Agent version of the tool concentrates on sites and contacts only, as these are the most likely ones in need of merging. The new tools do not use any Clarify technology. No more Clarify form customizations are required.
I’d like to use this opportunity to stress out the importance of having contact and site duplicates eliminated from the business process.
Why is this important ?
Due to spelling errors made by Call Center agents or automated feeds, there may be a situation when one contact or site is represented more than once in the database. For example, three contact records: "Mary Smith", "Mary J. Smith" and "Mary Joan Smith" represent the same individual customer "Mary Smith". This may lead to problems with proper identification of the contact later, resulting possibly with service being provided to a wrong customer.
It is highly desired to eliminate these duplicate records as soon as they appear.
How to deal with this problem ?
The superfluous records must be identified and made obsolete. All the objects associated with these duplicates (i.e. for contacts they include: alerts, commit logs, phone logs, contract-site roles, demand headers, cases, and contracts) must be reassigned to the record being kept. For this very reason, it is not recommended to do it manually! The Dovetail Agent Site/Contact Merge tools are the best choice to have it done safely and effectively. After the merge, duplicate records are no longer active and the remaining ‘master’ record now represents the contact providing access to all the associated objects.
The duplicate record elimination is a two-step process:
- selection of the records to be kept or eliminated,
- actual merging.
Step 1. is a manual action taken by a Dovetail Agent user. For a contact which is represented by more than one record it must be decided which one to keep and designate it as a ‘master’. A new ‘Mark Contacts for Merge’ screen makes it possible. The same screen is used to identify the duplicates to be eliminated – they must be marked as ‘aliases’. Similar ‘Mark Sites for Merge’ screen is available to perform this step for sites.
Step 2. is a batch script run which can be triggered manually on demand or scheduled to run periodically. The script reassigns all the objects from ‘alias’ contacts (or sites) to the ‘master’ contact (or site), and makes the ‘alias’ ones obsolete.
What is the best way to do it ?
It depends on how you become aware of the fact that duplicate contact or site records proliferate in your database.
For example, a call center agent may realize during a conversation with a customer that more than one contact records can be found for that person. This may be the best opportunity to take immediate action, obtain clarification of customer’s details, and mark duplicate contact records as ‘aliases’.
On the other hand, system administrators and business analysts who periodically run database queries and reports may realize that multiple contact records exist for the same customer. They can use ‘Mark for Merge’ screens to designate ‘master’ and ‘alias’ records.
No matter when the designation process takes place and by whom, it is later required to run the batch merge script to do actual merging. It is important to remember that until this script is executed in ‘merge’ mode, duplicate records remain visible and accessible to the users – just marking them as ‘aliases’ does not yet prevent the system from using them. The frequency of running the merge script depends on how quickly new duplicates appear, but the script may run ‘on empty’ without any harm to the database – if no records are marked for elimination, none will be affected. Therefore it is safe to run it regularly, unattended.
One more thing: a record marked as ‘master’ or ‘alias’ can be ‘unmarked’. This is an ‘undo’ capability for phase one of the merge process. For as long as the merge script has not been run, ‘master’/’alias’ designations of contacts and sites can be modified. Once the merge script has been executed, there is no going back – the duplicates are eliminated.
