Staying on top of duplicate CRM data is a constant battle. Deduplication processes are time-consuming and arduous—and they don’t usually finish the job. After most deduplication projects, companies are still left with a significant number of unidentified duplicates.
High duplication rates can have a profound impact on the health of a company. Bad data costs US organizations up to $3 trillion per year, by some estimates. Only 3% of companies meet basic data quality standards.
The most common way to deduplicate CRM contacts is by email. But there are complications that come with that. For example, the default deduplication features in most CRMs would miss two contact records with the emails “jane.doe@acme.com” and “jane.d@acme.com,” even though these records are duplicates.
There are many potential variations in business emails for a single contact. Prospects and customers may also use a personal email when filling out forms. For that reason, many companies choose not to use the email field to match duplicates.
Often, they end up using the phone number field. This is smart: Phone numbers are unique identifiers that are collected on most customer-facing forms. For this reason, they should be part of every deduplication project.
But like emails, the phone number fields have many issues that complicate deduplication and make duplicates difficult to detect. And those duplicates may flow into your CRM from multiple channels: customer forms, employee manual entry, imports, and integrations with other software.
When deduplicating by phone number, there is more nuance than you’d expect. Without standardized formatting, most CRM systems will not detect duplicate phone numbers.
How Phone Number Formatting Impacts Deduplication
Phone numbers are often a good choice for deduplication, usually as part of a well-rounded strategy that uses other matching fields as well.
But most CRM systems do not have an advanced way to catch duplicates for the myriad of different possible formats. For example:
- 897-563-4321
- 897.563.4321
- 1-897-563-4321
- (897)-563-4321
- (897)563-4321
- (897).563.4321
- 1.897.563-4321
Then there are country codes, area codes, and extensions to consider, and CRMs are usually unable to tell whether those are included. Phone number duplicates are difficult to find manually, too. It’s hard to sift through data and recognize advanced duplicates when the data doesn’t have consistent formatting.
For some companies, phone number is the most relevant data point for matching duplicates. For example, many B2C companies have customers in their database who have provided a phone number, but not an email address. For them, phone number formatting is even more crucial. Without it, they may not have a reliable matching field to use for a large portion of their database.
But while phone number formatting is critical for deduplication, it isn’t always easy to implement.
The Challenges of Standardizing Phone Number Format
Companies must manage records pouring in from multiple sources, some of which are entered manually, and others that come in from integrations.
This usually results in a number of different phone number formats. And in the absence of slick Excel functions or development help to account for all potential variations, you’re stuck with hours of error-prone manual work to convert your phone numbers to the desired standardized format.
Of course, companies and their employees do not want to do this.
Validation and Enforced Formatting Do Not Eliminate Duplicates
To deal with phone number formatting issues, companies often impose a formatting convention on data-entry employees. This is done with the best intentions but rarely is a long-term solution. That’s because employee-entered data is often just a small percentage of a company’s overall CRM data.
Many companies consider using their internal development resources to solve this problem. But developing a solution that can account for all variations in the phone number field isn’t an easy project. It will also require pulling developers away from other important tasks.
To combat duplicates, companies may implement phone number validation on their forms. They can standardize formatting for records submitted through these forms, eliminating dashes, parentheses, and periods. And that is a good idea. It limits the number of duplicate contacts that are created in your database because the phone numbers can’t be matched to an existing record.
But it won’t fix all of your issues with phone number deduplication.
Records will still flow into your CRM through integrations, and each integration might have a standardized format that is different from your company’s. Additionally, data that enters your database through the API may not be subject to formatting constraints.
CRM Limitations Make Deduplication by Phone Number Difficult
There may also be CRM limitations. For example, in Salesforce, phone numbers entered through the user interface are formatted automatically. However, if the data is entered into the database directly through the API, no formatting takes place. For companies that depend heavily on data flowing into their CRM through their API, this is an issue.
These issues compound when you are using multiple different CRMs. Then, you have to consider how each CRM works and the specific nuances of the merging processes—and figure out how to deduplicate without breaking the sync. The more systems you want to keep current, the more complex this becomes.
Auto-Dialer Integrations Create Duplicates in Your CRM
Auto-dialing solutions and other phone-based integrated apps are another source of phone number duplicates. They often create duplicates when there is inconsistency in formatting between the app and your CRM.
For example, if Jane Doe has the phone number “12121234567” in HubSpot, and Aircall or CallRails are looking for “212-123-4567,” they will create a duplicate.
In the end, it’s clear that companies simply can not avoid standardizing phone number formatting if they want to use that field for deduplication. Asking employees to follow a convention may help improve the situation, but is not a long-term solution. And trying to manage what customers enter into forms is a losing battle.
But manual formatting means that your team will spend many hours exporting data to Excel for formatting and standardization and then importing it back into the CRM—all so that you can begin your deduplication process. This is time-consuming, aggravating, and costly.
Insycle helps companies by allowing them to bypass phone number formatting before deduplicating. Insycle can detect and merge duplicates regardless of format while helping to ensure that all future records are consistently formatted.
How Insycle Enables You to Effectively Match Duplicates by Phone Number
The biggest hurdle to deduplication by phone number is inconsistent formatting. It’s an issue that is difficult to solve and standardization difficult to enforce.
Insycle’s Merge Duplicates module offers powerful and flexible deduplication using phone numbers, even when they have inconsistent formatting.
Similar Matching Catches Duplicates with Inconsistent Formats
Using the “Similar Match” comparison rule, Insycle can distinguish different formats while ignoring things like periods, parentheses, and dashes. You can also instruct Insycle to ignore symbols, whitespace, and other errant keystrokes in your data.
This frees your teams from hours of manual work reformatting entries in Excel. Additionally, because that process would be error-prone, you are likely to catch many more duplicates using Insycle than you would by hand.
With Insycle’s pre-built templates, you can identify and merge duplicates using a variety of field combinations. But you’re not limited to those templates. You can create custom templates for detecting duplicates using any field in your CRM.
Identify and Track Duplicate Data In Your CRM
Insycle also allows you to identify and track duplicate data in your CRM.
The Insycle Customer Data Health Assessment audits your CRM data across all major record types for common data issues and automatically tracks multiple types of duplicates.
How To Format Phone Numbers
Insycle can also rid your database of duplicates that result from phone number formatting inconsistencies. Insycle allows you to format your phone numbers using one of multiple popular domestic and international standards. Then your CRM default deduplication features will be able to identify duplicate records by phone number.
With proper formatting in place, you'll significantly reduce duplicates from integrated third-party phone systems.
Then, you can schedule your deduplication templates to run on a regular set schedule.
Imagine never having to worry about phone number duplicates again. With Insycle, you can set up automated processes that regularly scan your CRM data, identify duplicates, and merge them automatically.
Case Study: How Kitchen Magic Used Insycle To Catch 6,000 Phone Number Duplicates
Kitchen Magic is a kitchen renovation company with locations in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Company Systems Analyst James Marshall was in charge of managing CRM data and deduplicating records.
Duplicate records were causing sales reps to contact the same prospect twice or send marketing materials to prospects multiple times.
Kitchen Magic served an older demographic, and roughly 20% of their prospects and customers didn’t have an email address. This meant that deduplicating by email address was sure to miss many duplicates in their CRM. So Kitchen Magic needed to take a well-rounded approach.
Using Insycle, they identified more than 6,000 duplicates by phone number and merged them successfully, saving their teams time and avoiding hours of manual data entry.
“Before Insycle we had 6,000 duplicates (by phone number) inside of HubSpot. Now we have zero.” -James Marshall, Systems Analyst, Kitchen Magic
Insycle is a Complete CRM Data Management Tool
Insycle makes it easy to deduplicate by phone number, no matter what format, saving your team hours of manual work.
But duplicate detection and merging is only one piece of the larger data maintenance puzzle. Your CRM contains thousands of data issues. Correcting those data issues and implementing standards makes your whole organization more effective.
Insycle enables operations teams to fix CRM data quality issues in bulk and automate the data maintenance process. Without Insycle, the cost of bad data is a major blind spot for marketing and sales leaders and a roadblock for execution by their teams.
Are you tired of phone number formatting bogging down your deduplication efforts and eating away at your team’s time? Learn more about Insycle’s Merge Duplicates module and begin putting effective, automated bulk CRM deduplication processes in place.
