Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 12 - Finding Duplicate Contacts

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 12 - Finding Duplicate Contacts

Hey, everyone. Today we’re going to take a look at duplicate contacts in CRM. If you have a massive amount of contacts in your database, there’s a good likelihood that there are duplicates there. You have to have some way to figure out what is a duplicate and what is not a duplicate. Business Central does have a feature which helps you look for those. We’re going to take a quick look at that.

Let’s take a look at this small feature in the contact management or CRM inside Business Central. We’re basically talking about duplicates. If I go into Contacts, this is a big problem. If you have a lot of people entering in contacts, you’re going to get duplicates.

For example, I have my name four times, which is not good, a test customer is here. World Wide Bank is twice. This list even though I got a few records in it is getting messy. Let’s take a look at the duplicates.

If I go into Duplicates, I can take a look in here at Duplicate Contacts. The system is only telling me that I have one duplicate contact. That would be kind of weird because I just looked at the list, and I have lots of duplicates. Why is it only telling me that I have one?

If I take a look at this particular record, it looks like the name, address, city, postal code, email is all the same. There’s at least five fields here that are the same. This is clearly a duplicate on many levels. It’s all filled out.

The other one probably only had the name the same or something like that. Let’s figure out how it qualifies the duplicate. If I go into Marketing Set Up, Marketing Set Up is the set up for the CRM inside Business Central. I go into Duplicates right here.

It auto searches for duplicates, and it has a search hit percentage of 60%. Sixty percent has to be correct. If I look at the set up here, I can see the duplicate search string. This is how you set up what it’s looking for when it’s identifying a duplicate.

The first part of the name, first five letters have to be the same and the last part of the name, last five letters. It does the same thing for all of the fields here. You can basically go ahead and add fields in here that you want to be compared. You can make this a little less – if I just kept the name here and increased the length, I would have probably picked up everything.

You set this up, and in this case it maintains 60%. If there’s a 60% match, they’re going to say that’s probably a duplicate. It will list it in that screen. You can either identify it as being separate or delete the duplicate. It’s fairly simple. It works. It’s effective. It’s a good way to catch duplicates.