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Contact Merge tool can be used in a variety of customer service workflows dealing with duplicate contacts. Before continuing, some definitions may be helpful.
Throughout this document, you will encounter references to "master", "alias", "duplicate" and "candidate" contacts. They are defined as follows:
Master Contact – This is a reference contact for which there are one or more duplicates marked. During the course of eliminating duplicate contacts, this is a contact you wish to keep.
Alias Contact – This is a contact that has been marked as a duplicate in the system. A contact marked as an "alias" is an "alias" of a master contact. That is, the contact is a duplicate of the master. During the course of eliminating duplicate contacts, this is a contact you wish to discard.
Duplicate Contact – See Alias Contact.
Candidate Contact – This is a contact that has not been marked as an alias or master. Before using Contact Merge, all contacts are candidates.
For example, the document overview mentioned three contacts "Mary Smith", "Mary J. Smith" and "Mary Joan Smith" in the database, all representing the same individual "Mary Smith". Initially, these are all candidates. When a user selects "Mary Smith" as the reference contact, "Mary Smith" becomes the master contact. When the user selects "Mary J. Smith" and "Mary Joan Smith" as duplicates of "Mary Smith", "Mary J. Smith" and "Mary Joan Smith" become aliases of "Mary Smith".
The first step in eliminating "duplicate" contacts is noting in the system which contacts are "duplicates" of another. This can be performed as an administrative task or be performed by the customer service representative while taking a call (or both).
Administrative. For your business, it may make sense to eliminate duplicate contacts periodically as an administrative task. Once every few weeks or months, one or more administrative personnel use the Contact Merge form to mark duplicate contacts in the system.
End User. On the other hand, you may build the process of eliminating duplicate contacts into your front-line customer support process. In this way, as your customer service personnel locate contacts and notice duplicates, they can immediately mark them as such using the Contact Merge form.
Your business process may identify certain contacts as important and may wish to prevent them from being available for merging into another contact. To achieve this, use Contact Screen, go to 'Contact' tab, check 'Do not allow as Alias' checkbox, and click 'Replace' to save this setting. As a result, the 'Allow as Alias' column on Mark Contacts for Merge Form will be populated with 'No' instead of 'Yes' for this contact. This will make the 'Mark Candidate as Alias' button unavailable for such contact. Disallowing a contact from becoming an alias has no effect on ability to mark it as a master contact and merge other contacts into it.
After specifying a set of master and duplicate contacts, an administrator can gather metrics regarding the number of alias contacts currently marked. Using these metrics, the administrator can decide when the merge process should be run to process the alias contacts. The metrics reported will include the number of master and alias contacts and for each alias contact the number of alerts, commit logs, users, web users, phone logs, contract-site roles, demand headers, cases where the alias is a primary or alternate contact, biz org roles, contracts and contract roles.
The second step in eliminating duplicate contacts is to processes the marked duplicates. Processing means that objects (such as cases) related to contacts marked as a duplicate will be re-related to their master contact.
By processing alias contacts, the Merge Process will, for each alias contact, re-associate most objects related to the alias contact with the master contact. These objects are alerts, commit logs, phone logs, contract-site roles, demand headers, cases where the alias is a primary or alternate contact, biz org roles and contracts. A user or web_user related to an alias will have their status changed to inactive. Any contact roles related to the alias contact will be deleted. After processing of the related objects, the alias contact will be marked as obsolete in the Clarify database. Marking the contact as obsolete will prevent the contact from being included in future find-caller and Merge Contacts processing. When a case is associated with a master contact, a "Chng Contact" activity log entry will be created for the case.
Although the Merge Process can be executed manually, having it execute automatically at scheduled times can improve your data integrity and reduce system administration costs. We recommend that you setup the Merge process as a recurring scheduled task. How often it executes (daily, weekly, etc.) is best determined by your business.
To schedule a new task:
It is also possible to manage scheduled tasks from the command line using Schtasks.exe.
The Merge Process will change the status of alias contacts to Obsolete. These obsolete contacts can then be purged from your system. The Dovetail ArchiveManager product is intended exactly for this purpose – purging unneeded or obsolete data from your system. This purge process could also be setup as a scheduled task, similar to the Merge process described above. Refer to the ArchiveManager documentation for specific details on using ArchiveManager.
Merge Contacts is quite flexible in how it can be implemented into your Dovetail Agent business workflows. You can mix and match the above marking and processing techniques to best suit your needs. In all cases, when processing duplicate contacts, a detailed log is generated. In addition, when a case contact is re-related, an activity log entry is created to record the event.
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