Contact deduplication

Ticketmatic makes it easy to eliminate duplicate contacts and clean up your contacts database. Ticketmatic will automatically check for duplicates when you add new contacts or when existing contacts are updated.

The duplicate detection process runs continuously in the background and will automatically merge contacts if it is certain that two contacts are duplicates. The process will also detect potential duplicates based on rules you specify. Fuzzy logic can be applied to detect potential duplicates, meaning that even if there are spelling variations or partial input, the contacts will be marked as potential duplicates.

You will get a clear overview of potential duplicates that you can review periodically and you can conveniently decide to either merge the potential duplicates or refuse them. You can also manually merge contacts directly in the Contacts app.

Setting up contact deduplication

When contact deduplication is active, Ticketmatic will check in the background for potential duplicates. When a new contact is created or an existing contact is updated, Ticketmatic will verify if there are potential duplicates for this contact based on rules you specify.

You can specify the rules to use in the Contact deduplication module in the Settings app

You can define one or more rules. If at least one of the rules applies to a pair of contacts, they will be marked as potential duplicates.

The default rule will check on e-mailaddresses being equal. You are free to update or delete this default rule, however it is important to make sure all contacts in your database have a unique e-mail address: e-mail is the primary communication method with a contact, so it should be accurate and unique. Also, the e-mail address field is used as key for a contact when buying tickets online or when assigning a ticket to a ticketholder. If you want to link Ticketmatic to an e-mail marketing tool it is important as well, because e-mail marketing tools like Mailchimp or Campaign monitor don’t allow duplicate e-mail addresses.

When you create a new rule, you can select one or more fields to be compared and you can specify how the strict the comparison should be. All fields for a rule should apply for a pair of contacts to be marked as potential duplicate.

The fields that can be used in a rule are:

• First name
• Last name
• E-mail
• Address
• Phone number

Depending on the field you can select the type of match:

• Exact match: the fields should be exactly the same, except for leading and trailing spaces and case differences.
• Normalized match: the fields will first be normalized before comparing.
  • For phone numbers this means that all punctuation and spaces are removed, and that a leading 00 is replaced by a +. For example: +32473112233 and 0032 473 11.22.33 will match.
  • For addresses this means that for all fields are made lower case and all characters that are not a-z or 0-9 are removed. State and city field are also ignored
• Fuzzy match: a fuzzy comparison is executed on the field. If the similarity exceeds a certain threshold, the fields will be considered equal. This allows detection of small spelling or punctuation variations.

Once you have set up the rules, deduplication will start running in the background.

Reset deduplication

Ticketmatic will only verify new or updated contacts for potential duplicates. If you want to re-verify the complete list of contacts - for example after creating or updating a rule - you can manually trigger a verification of the full list of contacts by resetting the deduplication.

Click on the button Reset deduplication in the Contact deduplication module.

This action will reset all potential duplicates and mark all contacts for verification. You can optionally select to also reset the list of contact pairs marked as ’not a duplicate’. This will cause pairs of contacts that you previously marked as being no duplicates to be reverified as well.

Handling potential duplicates

You will find the list of all potential duplicates in the Contacts app. Click on Actions -> Manage duplicate contacts.

Click on the merge button to merge a contact pair together. When merging you select which contact is the primary contact. In case of conflicting values, the data of the primary contact will take precedence.

If you do not want to merge a contact pair, you can either:

• mark them as ‘Not a duplicate’. This means that this pair of contacts will never again be considered as duplicates
• ignore them. This means they will be removed from the list of potential duplicates for now, but can re-appear when they are reverified later

You do this by selecting one or more contact pairs, and using the buttons below.

If you want to review the contacts that were merged, you can use the Log button to show a chronological list of all merge operations.

Manual merge

At all times, you can manually merge contacts together. Simply select two or more contacts in the list, and Click Actions -> Merge contacts. You will be presented with the merge dialog. Select the primary contact and press Merge.