Duplicate Customers Overview

Personify360 helps prevent duplicate records so organizations can keep their database records accurate and detailed. Due to Personify360’s multi-company design, multiple committees and subgroups may exist with the same name. For this reason, duplicate processing only applies to Individual and Company records. It is not available for Committees and Subgroups. However, committee membership associated with an individual or company record WILL be merged during duplicate processing.

Duplicate data can be unknowingly entered through data entry, importing records by lockbox, and importing mailing lists for marketing purposes. Each of these processes has a different purpose, so managing duplicate records may have a different process as well. For example, an association may follow strict rules for data entry, but be more lenient for importing marketing lists.

Duplicate product orders can be created if each customer record has an order for the same product. All orders and payments are merged to the retained customer order, regardless of whether the order is a duplicate. However, you must manually cancel duplicate orders or line items to resolve this issue.

Duplicate customer processing is essentially a simple search and replace. The process reviews tables for the Customer ID values and replaces the duplicate record with the retained record. Data stored in child tables is updated.

Several performance issues with duplicate merging were traced to user database objects that do not use NOLOCK. Therefore, it is important to verify that you are using NOLOCK.

The batch process for merging duplicate records is detailed here:

Another method to merge duplicate records is through the Online Duplicate Customer Merge screen. Using this screen, you can identify two records that you already know are duplicates and consolidate them online without going through the batch process in the graphic above.

In this section:

· Preventing Duplicate Customers

· What is Merged

· What is Not Merged

· Identifying Potential Duplicate Customers

· Soundex vs. Phonetic

· Duplicate Customers on the Web