When you have hundreds and thousands of records in your CRM, as your business grows, it becomes a very difficult task to check for duplicates. Zoho CRM helps you arrest duplicates even before they can be created, with the help of what we call "unique fields".
When you mark a field as unique, CRM will search existing records for duplicates based on that field's value. For example, assume that you have marked Email address as a unique field in the Leads module. When you try to create a lead whose Email address is the same as an existing lead, CRM will throw a duplication alert. Clearly, two people cannot have the same email ID. Other examples include Social Security Numbers, Passport Numbers, Product codes and the like. In Zoho CRM, you can mark a field from any module as "Unique". Once marked as "Unique", these fields play a vital role in managing duplicate records in Zoho CRM in various instances including manual creation of records as well as records created via import, APIs, lead/sales order/quote conversion.
The administrator or a user with the Customize Zoho CRM profile permission will be able to mark a field as unique. Once a field is marked as unique in a module, you will be able to arrest the creation of duplicate records in that module via manual creation, imports, integrations, web forms and so on.
Despite marking a field as unique, over time, if you find that there might be duplicate records in your account, you can use CRM's de-duplication tools to clear them up.
Users with the Customize Zoho CRM permission in profile can enable this feature. All the Administrators will receive an email notification, when this feature is enabled or disabled. Please note that you need to enable it separately for the Leads and Contacts module. Once it is enabled, all the users can use it and they will be notified while adding a lead or a contact whose email address already exists in CRM.
Click on this link to know how to mark a field as unique and related notes: Mark a field as unique
Let's look at a scenario, you followed up with a lead named James and converted James to a Contact. Now, James is record in the Contacts module. Another sales rep in your team adds the same lead (James), without knowing that the lead has already been followed up with. Here, James is added as a lead again -this will simply be a duplicate entry.
When you enable the Duplicate Check Preference, the CRM system will prevent the creation of duplicate leads. This feature ensures that all leads, whether converted into contacts or directly added to the contacts module, are checked for duplicates. Once enabled, any attempt to create a duplicate lead in the Leads module will trigger a check against existing leads and contacts. If a match is found, the CRM will block the creation of the duplicate record.
There are two methods to enable Duplication check for Leads:
There are different ways of adding a record in Zoho CRM. You can fill the lead/contact form, clone a record, use the web forms, import records, use API and use many other ways to add records. Below, you will find the various scenarios when email duplication check is performed.
Email address duplication check will not be performed in the following scenarios:
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