RingCentral, a leading provider of cloud-based phone and communications app, plays a pivotal role in many organizations' daily operations. It enables seamless communication but also needs to be effectively integrated into CRM systems to ensure a comprehensive interaction history with each customer.
However, a common challenge arises when trying to sync RingCentral's system, which often records only the phone number of callers, but not names, addresses, or other information, with HubSpot CRM.
If RingCentral cannot match a phone number with an existing contact in HubSpot, it defaults to creating a new record. This isn't always due to the absence of a contact; more often, it's a matter of mismatched formats. Customers input their phone numbers into forms in various ways: (123) 456-7890, 123.456.7890, or +1 123 456 7890, to name a few. The disparity in separators, white space, area codes, and country codes means that a manually entered phone number is unlikely to align with RingCentral's standardized format.
This discrepancy can lead to duplicate contacts within HubSpot, each holding valuable pieces of interaction history. This fragmentation is more than a nuisance. It pierces the single customer view, a centralized perspective that is crucial for personalized marketing, sales efficiency, and customer service excellence.
Let’s explore the concept of the single customer view, the implications of duplicate records, and practical steps to deduplicate RingCentral contacts in HubSpot. By addressing these challenges head-on, businesses can reclaim the integrity of their customer data and ensure that every interaction with a customer is informed and strategic.
The single customer view is the holy grail of customer relationship management. It describes a unified, consistent understanding of a customer's interactions, preferences, and history with a company. This comprehensive snapshot enables businesses to deliver personalized experiences, anticipate customer needs, and build deeper relationships. In essence, it's about having all customer information in one place, accessible and up to date, so that every department can make informed decisions.
However, the integrity of the single customer view is compromised when duplicate records enter the scene. These duplicates are not just redundant pieces of information; they are fractures in the mirror that reflects the customer's journey.
When account-based sales teams delve into HubSpot to research contacts associated with a potential deal, they rely on complete and accurate data to tailor their approach. If interactions with key stakeholders are scattered across duplicate records created by RingCentral, crucial insights could be missed. This oversight can result in misinformed strategies and, ultimately, deals that fall through because the full picture was obscured.
For example, consider a scenario where a sales representative is preparing for a crucial meeting with a prospective client. They review the contact records in HubSpot to gather insights from previous interactions. Unbeknownst to them, several interactions are hidden within duplicate records created due to formatting discrepancies in phone numbers. As a result, the sales representative walks into the meeting unaware of a recent concern the client expressed during a call logged in a duplicate record. This lack of information can lead to a misstep that derails the entire sales process.
And these issues are not limited to sales teams, either. Marketing teams may have trouble segmenting contacts and personalizing campaigns when data is split between multiple records. Customer service teams go into conversations unaware of their previous interactions with your company, leading to negative customer experiences. Even decision-makers at the highest level may make decisions based on skewed reporting due to duplicates.
The proliferation of duplicate records does more than just create clutter; it actively disrupts the flow of information and the continuity of customer experience. It's a barrier to the seamless customer journey that businesses strive to deliver. In the next section, we will address how to tackle these duplicates directly within HubSpot and introduce a more robust solution to ensure that your CRM's integrity—and your single customer view—remains intact.
Deduplication is a critical process in maintaining the sanctity of your CRM data. HubSpot recognizes this need and provides tools to deduplicate contacts. However, when it comes to RingCentral duplicates, the challenge is nuanced due to the variability in phone number formats. HubSpot's deduplication tool can merge contacts by phone number, but it stumbles when the formats between existing contacts and RingCentral-created duplicates do not align.
For instance, HubSpot will not recognize (123) 456-7890 and 123.456.7890 as duplicates, even though they represent the same contact. This format mismatch means that duplicates often go undetected and unmerged, leaving sales and support teams with fragmented customer data.
When HubSpot does identify duplicates, the resolution process is manual. Each pair of duplicates must be painstakingly reviewed and merged one by one. This is not only labor-intensive but also time-consuming, diverting valuable resources from other critical tasks.
RingCentral-created records do not include the caller’s actual name. These records have a distinct pattern that can be used to identify them:
For example, a contact might appear as:
But don’t worry—you can use Insycle to bridge this gap.
Addressing the limitations of manual deduplication requires a robust, automated solution. Insycle fills this gap by offering a powerful tool that simplifies the deduplication process, allowing businesses to clean up their HubSpot contact lists in bulk and without the constraints of format discrepancies.
Insycle's advanced duplicate matching systems are designed to recognize and reconcile the variations in phone number formats. This means that whether a contact's phone number includes a country code, an area code, separators, or white space, Insycle can intelligently parse the number to its raw form and match it against existing records. This capability is crucial for identifying duplicates that HubSpot's native tools might miss.
You can see in the screenshot below that we have directed Insycle to ignore symbols, letters, and white space in phone numbers, then match.
You can also compare the phone number to related fields, such as mobile phone number, to catch more duplicates that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Moreover, Insycle allows users to customize deduplication criteria. For example, it can be instructed to ignore the “Caller” value in the first name field and the phone number in the last name field—placeholders used by RingCentral. Instead, it focuses on the phone number field alone, which is often the only consistent piece of data transferred from RingCentral.
By leveraging Insycle, you ensure that valuable interaction history and notes are preserved and consolidated. This is vital for maintaining a single customer view where every engagement with your sales, support, and customer success teams is accurately recorded and easily accessible.
Additionally, Insycle allows you to automate the merging of RingCentral-created duplicates immediately after they are created, by injecting Insycle Recipes into your Hubspot workflows.
Here's how Insycle streamlines the process:
This approach not only cleans your current data but also sets up a system for ongoing data hygiene, which is essential for dynamic CRM databases that are continuously updated with new interactions.
Elvis Rosa, a Data Specialist at Binomial—a savvy HubSpot consultancy and Insycle Agency Partner—faced a daunting challenge when a client approached them with a tangled web of HubSpot integrations that negatively impacted their business. Among the various issues they were able to help them navigate, the integration with RingCentral stood out as a significant culprit in the creation of duplicate records, which muddied the waters of the client's CRM and obscured the single customer view.
Binomial's strategy was methodical and tailored to the unique situation. The company leveraged Insycle's capabilities to:
Ignore “Caller” in the first name field: Binomial set Insycle to disregard entries where “Caller” was used as a placeholder in the first name field, a common occurrence in records created by RingCentral.
The company set Insycle to ignore the word Caller in the advanced settings:
Ignore digits and symbols in the last name field: RingCentral populated the last name field with the phone number by default. By ignoring numerical digits and symbols in that field, the company could focus on the meaningful text that would indicate a genuine contact entry.
Target RingCentral-created duplicates: Binomial ensured that each duplicate group included at least one record with the first name “Caller.” This step was crucial in confirming that they were indeed merging duplicates originating from RingCentral.
Avoid over-merging: Sometimes, for larger companies, it makes more sense to store the company’s primary phone number in the phone number field, and the personal extensions of employees in a secondary “extension” field. To prevent situations where you may accidentally merge all contacts of these companies because they have the same phone number, Insycle provides a failsafe that keeps you from merging groups that are too large.
With Insycle's advanced matching algorithms, Binomial could compare the phone numbers of duplicate records against existing contacts. This comparison was format-agnostic, meaning it could parse and recognize the underlying phone number regardless of how it was entered.
Once they identified matches, they proceeded with the merging. This wasn't just a consolidation of records; it was a careful unification of interaction histories into a single master record for each customer.
The result of Binomial's meticulous work using Insycle was a streamlined, deduplicated HubSpot CRM database. The single customer view was no longer a concept, but a reality, for the company’s client. Sales, marketing, and customer service teams could now access complete customer histories, enabling them to deliver personalized and informed customer experiences.
Binomial's hands-on and collaborative approach helped their client solve this RingCentral duplication issue, among many other problems in their HubSpot database, ensuring that the client was able to maximize their investment in their CRM.
This case study is a testament to the power of strategic data management. By using Insycle's sophisticated deduplication features, Binomial not only resolved the immediate issue of duplicate records but also reinstated the integrity of its client's CRM, paving the way for enhanced customer relationships and business growth.
Insycle delivers a complete solution for dealing with RingCentral-created duplicate records in HubSpot. It provides the flexibility that you need to use the phone number field as a reliable matching field, along with the automation to ensure that records are detected and merged continuously.
But Insycle goes beyond deduplication, offering a suite of tools that help businesses identify and rectify a wide range of data quality issues. This includes cleaning up formatting inconsistencies, standardizing data entry, associating records and even identifying incomplete records. Insycle provides a bird's-eye view of your data health, allowing you to spot trends and issues before they become problems, ensuring that your CRM system is not just a repository of information, but a reliable engine that drives business growth.
We invite you to explore how Insycle can reshape your approach to HubSpot data management. By automating the tedious task of data cleaning and deduplication, Insycle frees up your team to focus on what they do best: building relationships and growing your business.