Merging Duplicate Contacts with Contact Roles

[CRMSarah]

Hey everyone, I participated in the webinar a couple of weeks ago for Advanced Duplicate handling and I thought I was all squared away but I just realized that it doesn't solve my problem because my issue spans across the Contact & Contact Roles Objects. 

We have a bunch of duplicate contacts in our system that I'm attempting to clean up, however, our business is very heavily reliant on the Roles for that Contact. So when I merge contacts, I need these Contact Roles to remain intact. I thought that the "Combine Values" option would help, however, it doesn't because technically Contact Roles is a separate object. 

Further Explanation & Background: 
To explain one step further, if a contact has a Role of "Support Contact" for an account, they show as a contact in our application which allows that person to select themselves when submitting a support case to us. 

Now, if the Contact is related to more than one account, but has a role of Support Contact one of those accounts, they are only allowed to submit Support Tickets for that particular Account. 

Any thoughts on how to get around this?

[JonG_Validity]

Hi @CRMSarah, we're glad to hear you attended the Advanced Dedupe Tactics webinar - it's one of my favorites!

While looking at your use case, I think we need some more information in order to guide you in the proper direction. Are you able to attend our weekly office hours tomorrow, March 8th, at 1:30 PM EST? You can register at this link & we will be able to work through this together. If not, let me know and I can message you for additional details.

[CRMSarah]

Hey @JonG_Validity, I registered! Looking forward to talking about this. 

[JonG_Validity]

@CRMSarah Just following up on our conversation in Office Hours today - I have created a support ticket on your behalf and will post a solution here once found. Thank you!

[CRMSarah]

Thanks so much, Jonathan! 

[aragon]

We also use contact roles and the merges will not go through if the contact roles are on both accounts. I dont know of any other way except taking those that error and going to the contact role and removing one of the relationships so it will finally merge.