How to Prevent Duplicates in CRM?

Why Duplicates Occur

• The same person enters information once with a company address and once with a private address
• The company name is written differently: "Müller GmbH", "Mueller GmbH", "Müller Gesellschaft mbH"
• Two people create the same contact simultaneously
• An import runs twice

What Really Helps

Checking during entry. As soon as an email address or phone number is entered, the system checks and displays matches. This costs the user one second and prevents most cases.

Normalization. Store phone numbers in a uniform format, ignore corporate suffixes during comparison, standardize umlauts.

Regular similarity search. A monthly run that presents suspicious cases for review – not automatically merging.

Why Not Automatically Merge

Because two similar datasets sometimes represent two different people. Father and son in a family business, two locations of the same chain. Automatic merging irreversibly destroys data.

When Merging, Consider

• Which dataset leads, which is incorporated
• Take history, tasks, and documents from both
• Consent for marketing: The more restrictive one wins
• Document the process

Before Import

The most important moment. An uncleaned import creates more duplicates in minutes than manually occur in months.