Manually Merging Duplicate Customers

The manual method of merging duplicate customers is through the Online Duplicate Customer Merge screen. Using this screen, you can view two records you already know are duplicates and merge them without going through the batch process. This screen verifies that the records are actually duplicates and initiates a procedure that consolidates the records.

Before manually merging duplicate customers, ensure that you have defined the tables to be merged. For more information, please see Defining Tables to be Merged.

Once the records are merged, a "DUPLICATE" relationship is automatically created between the retained customer and the duplicate customer, as shown below.

Additionally, the duplicate customer will be marked as "Duplicate" in the header on CRM360, as highlighted below.

When the “Merge Fail” = “MERGE”, the merge process updates the Master Customer ID and Sub Customer ID fields of the respective table for the duplicate customer with the retain customer. However, if these fields (Master Customer ID and Sub Customer ID) are part of the primary key or unique key of the table and both the duplicate and merge customers have their own record for the same table, when you try to merge these customers, the Duplicate Customer Not Merged error message displays because you cannot have two rows with same primary key value. When the “Merge Fail” = “DELETE”, the merge process deletes the Duplicate Customer records if the same record exists for the retain customer. This delete statement will check only based on the Master Customer ID and Sub Customer ID fields. For example, you have a table called CUS_COUPON. It has the primary key on COUPON_ID and have an unique constraint based on ORG_ID, ORG_UNIT_ID, COUPON_CODE, MASTER_CUSTOMER_ID, and SUB_CUSTOMER_ID. Scenario 1: if both customers have one record with the same values for ORG_ID, ORG_UNIT_ID, and COUPON_CODE, when you try to merge, it will give you an error message. Since you now know that both customers have the same record, you can verify or modify the records manually before changing the “Merge Fail” to “DELETE”. Scenario 2: if both customers have one record each with same value for ORG_ID and ORG_UNIT_ID, but COUPON_CODE is different, after changing “Merge Fail” to “DELETE” for scenario 1 and if you have not changed back to “MERGE”, it will delete the duplicate customer record for scenario 2 too, which is wrong. The duplicate customer row should go to the retain customer as the duplicate customer has a different Coupon Code.

As of 7.4.1, if a customer is created from e-Business using SSO and another customer is created from Personify360 (but SSO web access is not created) with the same details as that of the e-Business customer, when the two customers are merged and the customer created from Personify360 is retained, the SSO web access information will be retained.

To manually merge duplicate customer records:

1.    From the toolbar, select Customers and Committees > Duplicate Customers > Duplicate Customer Merge (Online).
The Online Duplicate Customer Merge (CUS200) screen displays, as shown below.

2.    From the Customer to Retain Information section, enter a Customer  ID or click the link and search for the customer to retain.
The customer information displays. The information displayed is read-only. You cannot edit records from this screen.

You can only select a customer with a CUSTOMER_STATUS in which the Option 2 field is set to "ACTIVE". The customer's Customer Status is defined on the Demographics screen in CRM360.

3.    From the Duplicate Customer Information section, enter a Customer  ID or click the link and search for a duplicate customer to merge with the customer to retain.
The customer information displays. The information displayed is read-only. You cannot edit records from this screen.

4.    Review the information for both to verify the records are duplicates and that the customer on the left is the one to be retained.

As of 7.4.2, duplicate household records can be merged. If a household record is selected as the customer to retain, the Household Members section will display below. From the Duplicate Household Information section, click the Household link to select the household to be merged with the retained household.

5.    From the Merge Customer task category, click Merge Customers.
A confirmation pop-up screen displays, as shown below.

Information in the Customer table is not copied from the merged record to the retained record. Since this data is generally a one-to-one relationship, it is assumed that the most current information is already in the retained record.

6.    Click Yes.
The application merges the duplicate record with the record to be retained.