How to keep all email & phone values when merging Leads or Contacts

Use Case

XYZ Company is merging duplicate Contacts and needs to retain all contact information (phone numbers, email addresses, etc.). Within their business rules for email address handling, how can they:

1. Keep the email address from the subordinate record with the most recent activity and use it to populate the Alternate Email field on the master record
2. Keep all unique email addresses and put them in the Other Emails field on the master record

XYZ Company email field rules:

• The standard Email field holds the primary email address
• A custom Alternate Email field holds the secondary email address
• When merging, if the Alternate Email field is blank, populate it with the email address from the subordinate record with the most recent activity if it is different than the email on the master record
• Tasks and Events are typically a sign of interaction with a Lead/Contact so they deduced that contact details (email, phone) are up to date on the record with the most recent activity

Solution

• Merge the duplicates with the Single Table Dedupe module
• Use the Field Rules feature to retain the email addresses and have them placed in the proper field
• Field Rules option, Field Copy Unique Scoring, finds the email address on the subordinate record with the most recent activity date and pastes it into the Alternate Email field
• Field Rules option, Field Copy Unique Merge, combines all unique email addresses from the subordinate records and pastes them into the Other Emails field on the master record

*To keep all phone numbers simply repeat this setup on your phone fields*

Solution Setup Details

• Salesforce fields needed
  • Email
    • Standard field
    • Holds primary email address from the master record
  • Alternate Email
    • Custom field, email data type - so it appears in the email address drop-down when emailing via the Salesforce interface
    • Holds secondary email address from a subordinate record with the most recent activity
  • Other Emails
    • Custom field, text area (long) data type - so multiple values can be concatenated
    • Holds all other unique email addresses from the remaining subordinate records
    • Needed when merging groups of 3 or more

Field Rules Definitions & Setup

• Field Copy Unique Scoring
  • Copies a unique value, for a specified field, from one subordinate record of the user’s choice and pastes the value into a separate field on the master record
  • Example: copy the value in the Email field from the subordinate record with the most recent activity and paste it into the Alternate Email field on the master record
• Field Copy Unique Merge
  • Copies all unique values, for a specified field, from all subordinate records and pastes the values into a separate field on the master record
    • The data type of the field the values are being pasted and merged into must be picklist (multi-select); text area; text area (long); text area (rich)
      • Picklist (multi-select) field values are separated by a semi-colon
      • Text area, text area (long), and text area (rich) field values are separated by a carriage return
• Example: copy all unique values in the Email field and paste them into the Other Emails field on the Master record

See image for Field Copy Unique scoring setup

See image for Field Copy Unique Merge setup