Hi All,
Has anyone customized a way to merge multiple 100% duplicate records, more often than one set at a time? We are on V15.2.31 and due to Guest checkout, customers are constantly creating new records. One customer has 46 records. We could merge them individually but it will take a long time. Hoping someone has found an answer and is willing to share. Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Tatiana
I thought Guest Checkout was smart enough to detect if there was already an account for the customer (if email matched). Is that not the case?
In our experience, that is not the case. We have the same issue as Tatiana.
I see that problem here too, not on this great of a scale but still several records created at a time. sorry cant offer a solution but I just wanted to join the conversation in case anyone else has a good idea.
We have the same problem! We are part of a consortium in Sydney managed by the Sydney Opera House, and they have a custom merge procedure which runs I think once a week. It looks to specific criteria to determine if two records are duplicates, and determines the keep/delete records based on a set of rules, and then merges them. Its handy, but I've always been a bit scared to switch it on for our database in case it picks the wrong record as the keep and we lose more current data. The duplicates are getting so our of control though. We actually switched guest checkout off on our ticketing T-New as it was creating so many duplicates, and our marketing team didn't like that it didn't allow customers to opt in to e-news. However we have it on for our donation T-New to allow one page giving, and this creates a lot of duplicates to manage.
When we implemented Tessi and imported all our legacy constituent records from 17 different sources we did some custom merges based on really specific criteria relating to the currency and accuracy of the data sets we were importing (eg I know one team had really cleaned and updated their data, vs another who barely looked at theirs). This was something we asked Tessi consulting to do for us.
An automatic merge utility based on criteria we could define in the application would be a great idea for the ideas board!
No, not in our case. Multiple records are created with the same email address.
Thank you Tash! I would love a customized merge function for the 100% duplicate records. That would lessen the dupes a lot. It sounds like we may have to work with consulting services for a customized merge process. I wonder if we will be able to select the Keep ID in merges more than just once in V16
That would be amazing... I understand why the standard merge procedure won't do it (eg. it won't merge records if there's been activity on the record after it was scheduled), but man, to be able to say "this record is the keep, and those 6 others are the bad ones" would be amazing.
also, how many times can i say "amazing" in one post, lol!
In a previous version you could manually schedule multiple accounts to merge. It was amazing! :) There is an idea for this if you want to upvote it.
https://community.tessituranetwork.com/ideas/i/ideas/multiple-merge-constituents?_ga=2.103034624.1683433816.1696256359-381429433.1683893955
Guest Checkout is a scourge on our process, but here it is such as it is. First automatic merges are scheduled based on matching names and postal addresses. Also, member orgs create requests via CSIs, which are scheduled manually. Between scheduling merges and processing them, a weekly scheduled merges report goes out to all the orgs to give them a chance to review and request changes such as switch keep and delete. That report includes organizational constituencies, so most orgs just look at the merges for their own constituency. Finally the merges are processed weekly. Repeat.
Additionally, there's quarterly review based on duplicate emails on multiple accounts in a similar process. Because of logins, and guests for orgs that allow it, duplicate emails are trickier.