If your organization has decided to use a third-party tool to cleanse your data as a part of your initial data load, you may choose to use a tool to identify duplicate contacts externally.
Because of the many links each contact has into different user collections and folders as well as the information that may be maintained on each contact, you should never just delete duplicate versions of a contact. Instead, you should use InterAction’s merge features to automatically combine all versions of a duplicate contact into one contact that contains all the information available on each contact.
Using LexisNexis InterAction Data Quality Services (DQS) or the data cleansing services of an LexisNexis InterAction business partner, groups of duplicate contacts can be identified. After you bring the contacts back into InterAction, you can easily merge these groups of duplicate contacts.
To identify the contacts that are part of each group, InterAction includes two additional fields.
Duplicate Contact Group ID Additional Field
This field is used to identify each group of contacts that are duplicates of each other. Each group must have a unique value, otherwise the duplicate merge feature may merge contacts that are not duplicates. Because of this, InterAction prompts you to clear the Duplicate Contact Group ID field when you are using Advanced Import to populate these fields with values if contacts in InterAction already have values for these fields.
By default, the two additional fields are inactive.
Duplicate Contact Rank Additional Field
InterAction uses this field to determine the order in which duplicate contacts are merged. InterAction chooses one contact in each group of duplicates into which the other duplicate contacts are merged. Contact are merged two at a time. Because of this, each contact’s rank matters when merging contacts. Your organization’s third party solution may be able to identify the best contact out of the group of duplicates and then rank all duplicates of that contact. In this duplicate ranking, when defining the rank, 1 should be assigned to the best contact and others should be assigned a numerical rank in descending order from best to worst.