THE DOOD FIELD GUIDE / IMPLEMENTATION
Contact data quality: fix the record before the report
Design matching, ownership and review rules before importing or syncing contacts.
By Mrunal Walke ↗ FOLLOW THE HANDOFF
Open a worked example ↗
Illustrative example: one buyer uses a personal address for a first enquiry and a work address for a proposal. An email-only rule treats them as two people. A shared company domain is not sufficient proof that two contacts are the same.
Separate the person, company and opportunity
A person can move company or participate in more than one purchase. Keep the contact identity separate from the account relationship and opportunity history. Decide which relationship fields are required and preserve the original source reference. Do not use a display name as a permanent integration key.
Decide what a duplicate means
Create candidate matches using stable references where available. Review ambiguous matches rather than merging by name alone. Before a merge, inspect activity history, open tasks, consent state and related orders. Keep an audit record and recovery path; a cleaner count is not useful if the merge loses the commercial history.
Give each field an owner
Write down which system may change billing details, sales status and support ownership. A two-way sync without field ownership can repeatedly undo legitimate changes. Define whether blanks mean unknown or intentionally cleared. Reject incomplete updates into an exception queue with a named reviewer.
Reconcile a sample before migration
Use a representative sample containing duplicates, inactive records, missing accounts and nonstandard characters. Count accepted and rejected rows, then inspect relationships rather than only the total. Ask a salesperson to find an old conversation and its next action. If they cannot, the import is not ready for rollout.
Should we delete all incomplete contacts?
No. Review retention needs and business context first. Incomplete records may contain useful history; tag them for review rather than deleting them automatically.
MAKE IT PART OF YOUR WORKFLOW
A useful tool. A connected business.
Bring your customer, inventory and accounting workflows together. Tell us where the handoff gets difficult.
