Maintaining the accuracy and integrity of your customer information is crucial. However, as businesses increasingly integrate various software platforms to streamline operations, they often encounter a pesky problem: data duplication.
This data duplication issue can arise when you integrate HubSpot with CallRail, a call tracking and analytics system for inbound calls. HubSpot identifies and merges duplicates by contact emails, but CallRail typically collects phone numbers, not emails. When HubSpot requires an email address, CallRail typically fills in that field with a placeholder email with the "@call.com" domain.
In the event that the CallRail record actually refers to an existing contact, HubSpot won’t recognize it because the email address won’t match the email in the HubSpot record. This can result in duplicate records, creating a confusing and frustrating environment for businesses to navigate.
Duplicate data not only creates operational inefficiencies but also skews analytics, inflates costs, and negatively impacts customer experiences. And when you have a HubSpot-CallRail integration, deduplicating becomes really difficult using HubSpot features because those features rely on the email field.
This issue isn’t isolated to the HubSpot-CallRail integration. It is also a common scenario for many HubSpot phone apps.
Companies employ several strategies to tackle these issues, but they often prove to be laborious and irritating to manage, requiring considerable resources and technical know-how. Even so, they are a necessary evil to ensure the smooth running of operations and maintain a clean and accurate database. So, let's take a deeper look into these duplication issues and the existing solutions to help you better understand and tackle these challenges in your own business operations.
Duplicate contact records in HubSpot that result from CallRail integration can have several negative impacts on your business. These impacts can be broadly categorized into operational inefficiencies, skewed analytics, increased costs, degraded customer experience, and ineffective segmentation and personalization. Here's a detailed breakdown:
To avoid these issues, it's crucial to implement data hygiene best practices, such as regular data cleanups, using HubSpot's built-in deduplication feature. Businesses should also set up proper rules during the integration process to prevent the creation of duplicate records.
There are numerous common duplication issues that you should be aware of when you have CallRail and HubSpot integrated. The most common duplication issue arises from the use of the placeholder email.
When a caller calls into the CallRail-connected phone number, CallRail will automatically create a duplicate contact record if it does not recognize the phone number as belonging to another contact.
CallRail does not automatically collect the email from the caller, and the only way to do so is for the company rep to ask for it while on the phone. If the rep does not enter an email address manually, a duplicate record can result. This is because CallRail will input a placeholder email address. Even if HubSpot already contains a record for the caller, it won’t recognize the contact because the @call.com placeholder email won’t match the email address in the original record. As a result, you’ll end up with a duplicate record.
When CallRail sends data to HubSpot, this is the process that it follows:
Once a call to one of your CallRail-tracked phone numbers is complete, CallRail sends the phone call information to HubSpot as a call activity. CallRail will either link the call activity to an existing HubSpot contact or create a new contact using the following process:
You can set up the integration so that no new leads are created from CallRail activity. However, many companies will prefer to create the contacts and deal with any resulting duplicates afterward.
CallRail sends the following information to HubSpot:
Now let’s look at some of the common issues that arise during this process.
When you see an email address with "@call.com" in your HubSpot contacts, it is an indicator of a placeholder email that was automatically created during the CallRail integration.
CallRail primarily tracks phone calls, and often, the system may not have an associated email address for a particular contact. However, HubSpot requires an email address to create a new contact. So, during the integration, if CallRail sends data for a contact that doesn't have an email address, it needs to generate a placeholder email to satisfy HubSpot's requirements.
This is usually a sign that your phone call data and your email data aren't fully aligned. It can be problematic because it can lead to duplicate contacts (one with the real email and one with the placeholder), and it can also mean that some of your contacts in HubSpot aren't reachable by email.
This can cause numerous problems for companies. Here's why:
To alleviate these issues, you would need to try to populate valid unique identifiers (like actual email addresses or a unique ID, if possible) or use other unique contact properties to deduplicate records.
Ideally, companies want to be able to isolate the duplicate groups that include the @call.com placeholder email, and merge those records with other duplicate records in the system as well. For example, a duplicate group might contain four contacts, only one of which was created by the CallRail integration.
Custom deduplication logic may need to be developed (either manually or programmatically) using available APIs or other tools. As always, it's essential to refer to the latest HubSpot documentation or reach out to their support for the most accurate and current information.
Let’s delve into the various strategies that companies are employing to handle the persistent and troublesome issue of data duplication resulting from the CallRail and HubSpot integration.
While some businesses resort to manual cleanup, others leverage HubSpot's deduplication features in Operations Hub, third-party tools, or even custom solutions. However, these solutions often take a long time and are frustrating to manage, requiring significant resources or technical expertise. And once the deduplication is completed, it’s only a matter of time before the business needs to do it all over again.
Let's explore these strategies in detail and understand why they can often be more of a burden than a boon.
Many businesses take a hands-on approach to dealing with CallRail duplicates with the placeholder email. This involves identifying duplicates and merging or deleting them as appropriate.
Which doesn’t sound so bad, right? Except that the process of identifying and merging duplicates manually in HubSpot is incredibly time-consuming and sure to result in low morale for your teams.
Let’s take a look at what the manual process for identifying and merging CallRail-created contacts in HubSpot would look like, step by step:
Insycle is a complete data management tool for HubSpot, but also features advanced HubSpot deduplication features that make it an ideal choice for dealing with duplicates that have the @call.com placeholder as a result of the HubSpot-CallRail integration.
With Insycle, you can:
To start, Insycle allows you to use any field in HubSpot CRM as a potential deduplication matching field, allowing you to catch more duplicates using creative combinations of fields.
You also have advanced control over how the data contained within the field is evaluated. For example, you can compare phone numbers but instruct Insycle to ignore symbols and whitespace, so that phone numbers with different formatting can still be identified as matching.
Using advanced settings, you can also match duplicates using secondary related fields. For instance, you might tell Insycle to not only match duplicate contacts using the phone number field but to compare the phone number field to the mobile phone number field as well.
This is especially helpful in identifying duplicate contacts that have been created by CallRail. Since HubSpot does not automatically deduplicate contacts using the phone number field, and the only identifying information that CallRail pushes to HubSpot is the customer’s name and phone number, you’ll need to deduplicate by phone number to merge duplicates created by CallRail.
You can also set specific conditions, such as allowing some of the matching fields to be empty, requiring at least one record that matches certain requirements, or requiring that all records have a value in a specified field.
For merging HubSpot-CallRail duplicates, you could instruct Insycle to require that at least one of the duplicates in the group contains an email with the @call.com placeholder. This helps to ensure that you are zeroing in on duplicates that were created by CallRail.
Once merged, you have complete control over the resulting master record. You can set advanced rules for determining which record should be chosen as the master.
For example, if you wanted to ensure that the CallRail record was chosen as the resulting master record post-merge, you could set a master record selection rule that says that the email must contain “@call.com,” which ensures that CallRail-created records will be selected as the master. Conversely, you could use the “doesn’t contain” condition to ensure that the master record is not a record that was created by CallRail.
Then, if you have specific concerns over how the data is retained after the merge, you can set rules for data retention on a field-by-field basis.
For the CallRail duplicates issue, you can tell Insycle to retain the email from a record that does not contain the “@call.com,” placeholder, so that you have a better chance of retaining the customer’s correct email.
Additionally, you can instruct Insycle to keep field data from the record that was most recently updated, or even combine and append all of the values together after the merge, which is useful for notes or engagement tracking fields.
With your template set up to reliably identify and merge HubSpot duplicates that were created by CallRail, you can automate it to run on a set schedule, ensuring that CallRail duplicates are consistently identified and merged.
Using Insycle Recipes, you can even bundle templates together and automate them to be run as a group, in a specific order. Then, you can schedule the recipe to run on a specific schedule, or inject it into HubSpot Workflows. That way, CallRail duplicates will be identified and merged immediately after they have been created.
Let's take a look at a real-world example involving a customer that we'll refer to as "Robinson Agency" for the sake of this case study. Robinson Agency is a participant in the Agency Partner Program with Insycle. This forward-thinking organization understands the importance of efficient data management for its clients.
Robinson Agency was working with a client that had integrated CallRail with HubSpot. While this combination had been instrumental in its operations, the client faced a significant challenge: data duplication, primarily due to the placeholder emails that CallRail uses when creating new contacts in HubSpot.
The placeholder emails are typically created in the format "phonenumber@call.com." These placeholders weren’t real email addresses, so HubSpot could not match new contacts to existing ones. Instead, it created duplicate contacts, leading to confusion and inefficiencies. Robinson Agency needed a solution that could recognize these placeholder emails and retain the real email when merging duplicates in HubSpot.
Enter Insycle. Insycle's system was able to recognize when a duplicate group contained at least one contact with an "@call.com" email, and merge those groups effectively in bulk, while retaining the required data in every field. Insycle was instrumental in helping Robinson Agency identify CallRail-created duplicates, retain real emails, and eliminate placeholder emails when merging duplicates in HubSpot.
The implementation of Insycle's solution led to a significant reduction in data duplication for Robinson Agency’s client. The system's ability to identify and handle placeholder emails effectively streamlined the client’s data management process and improved its efficiency and accuracy, all without having to swap out CallRail for a different call management system.
Insycle can be a game-changer in dealing with CallRail duplicates in HubSpot. Its advanced deduplication feature can automate the process, saving businesses valuable time and effort. With Insycle, you can easily identify and merge duplicates, providing a streamlined solution to this persistent issue.
However, Insycle isn't just a deduplication tool. It's a comprehensive data management solution for HubSpot, offering features for data cleaning, bulk editing, and health assessments. It's designed to improve your data accuracy, streamline operations, and help you make informed decisions. Insycle surfaces data issues that would otherwise go unnoticed in your CRM, impacting operations.
Tired of grappling with data management issues in HubSpot? Explore Insycle's HubSpot capabilities. Discover how Insycle can enhance your HubSpot operations, improve the quality of your data, and position your company for growth.