Contact dedupe Winner Rules contact field equals Account field

[Jakewenzel]

Hi Community,

I am trying to run a dedupe on contacts. I want to set up a winner rule that prioritizes contacts that have the same lifecycle stage (ContactLifecycleStage__c) as the related account's lifecycle stage (AccountLifecycleStage__c), over contacts that do not have same lifecycle stage as the Account they are related to. Perhaps a field rule that would update the lifecycle stage to match the Account lifecycle stage would work too.

Has anyone had experience running a similar use case?

[Pugs_Validity]

Hey @Jakewenzel - Interesting use case. Certainly reccomend submitting a feature request to handle this. Is your desire to always have the ContactLifecycleStage_c match the AccountLifecycleStage_C? Or only post-merge? Or is that contact-account matching a deciding factor in what the winning contact should be? Does the AccountLifecycleStage_c live as a lookup on the related contact or are you looking to utilize a hierarchy lookup in DemandTools? My reccomended method to solve would vary depending on those.

[Jakewenzel]

Hi @Pugs_Validity thanks for getting back to me.

We want to use this as a winner rule to decide which contact out of the dupes to be the winning record, because we don't want to lose the contact lifecycle stage if it got moved up to the same as the accounts, and this is likely the contact record being utilized most.

AccountLifecycleStage_c is a field at the account level, however we do have a formula field RelAccountLifecycleStage_c that pulls the account's lifecycle stage to the contact record.


E.g in this screenshot, we would want the outlined record to be the winner over the two records that are in lead lifecycle stage. In the set below that, we would use other winner rules to decide the winner as they are both not at the same lifecycle stage as the account, and we would leave their lifecycle stage as is.

[Pugs_Validity]

@Jakewenzel - This is a bit tricky since I'm sure the statuses frequently change. My reccomendation would be to create a check box field on the Contact, such as Match Account Status?. What we'll do is execute a Modify formula prior to doing our Dedupe to check if the status on the contact matches the account. Doing this everytime prior to deduping the contacts will ensure we are relying on current information. Ultimately, we'll use the Match Account Status? checkbox as part of our Winner Rule criteria. 

1) Go to Modify > Object: Contact > Formula

2) Field to change: Match Account Status?

3) Formula: IF(${Status__c}=${Account.Status__c}, "TRUE", "FALSE") : You'll need to change Status_c to the field we are matching on the Contact object and Account.Status_c to it's companion on the Account Status we are checking. 

4) Execute job then run our Contact Dedupe. 

Let us know if you have any quesitons. Feel free to reach out to DemandToolsCOE@validity.com for a deeper dive.