I do not understand why the duplicate check does not include phone numbers. It is creating a lot more work and should be there. NO COMMON SENSE REASON NOT TO HAVE THE PHONE NUMBER AS A DUPLICATE!!! I have been trying to get in touch with someone to fix this and gone through chat and submitting tickets and every way I can find! Please fix this! I cannot believe it is not set up like this! Why would you not use phone to check for duplicates??? Just really! Old people may not have email but everyone has a phone!! Those of us in industries that work with the elderly need this capability. Maybe I need to change from infusion soft to Hub Spot or some other platform that gets this common sense need customers have!
I don’t work for Infusionsoft so I can’t speak to the reasons behind the way the dupe check is set up, but I do share your frustration!
I do a lot of custom API work with Infusionsoft and I bet you could set up a web application that would let you do a dupe check in your app that included phone numbers and was tailored the way you need it to work for your industry. One of the bright spots of Infusionsoft is that when certain aspects of its user interface fall short, the API can often compensate.
You could probably get a custom dupe check built by a consulting shop for the equivalent price of a few months of Infusionsoft monthly payments, which might be worth it to keep your investment in the system but get around the frustration of the dupe check. If that’s a hard pill to swallow I totally get it! You expect these kinds of things to work out of the box.
Full disclosure: I work at one of those shops, Contingency.
Hi @Rachel_Campbell3, if you want a 3rd party solution, then I maybe able to help you.
I develop a Chrome Browser Extension called XtendIn (https://xtendin.com/) which adds features into Infusionsoft Interface. It does have an option to check for Duplicate Phone Numbers within the Contact Record as shown in the picture at the bottom.
If you do not want to use 3rd party solutions, then you would need to get a developer as like what Damon said.
Unfortunately raising tickets will not get Infusionsoft to make any changes. There is literally 100s of suggestions that have been made over the years, but virtually 99% of them do not get implemented. Some suggestions would only take a few hours or a few days to implement.
As for other platforms, good luck in finding one that fits your needs. Because they usually fall in the same boat and do not listen to people suggestions. Only recently the Keap product introduced Email Duplicate Checking, not even Infusionsoft has that feature.
XtendIn - Phone Duplicate Checker
Thank you both for the response!
I am using Zapier currently and while the information is there something is blocking it from working. It is Infusion saying they will not allow the process to go through? Even though the set up is there. It clearly should work and I am getting a blocking happening in Infusion. What are you doing Pav to make it work when Infusion blocks the process?
I am using Zapier to feed the contact record the update that the person called, but Infusion Soft is not recognizing the contact as one that already exists because phone calls do not create emails. I cannot fathom how they have not fixed this but it is crazy. I would think using the 3rd party service Zapier should work since they have it lined up to push but Infusion is literally sending a block to checking for duplicates this way.
Thanks so much,
Rachel Campbell
Marketing Director
6370 Magnolia Avenue, Suite 320**
Riverside, CA 92506**
Text: (909) 367-2020
Phone: (951) 683-3704 ext. 103
Fax: 951-683-3948
Unfortunately Infusionsoft will allow Duplicate Records to be created if done in particular ways. For particular client setups, duplicate records can interfere with 3rd party software.
My solution does not block anything at all. It is only a visual cue on the Contact Record to indicate there is other records with the same details. It is down to the person to deal with that.
So you have a Zapier setup to process your records. Although there is something you need to be aware of. When you enter Phone Numbers into Infusionsoft as pure numbers, it tries to format them into US Format, with brackets and dashes. So “001 555 1234” will become “(001) 555-1234”. Now that causes problems when looking up via the API, because if you try to search for 001 555 1234 it needs to match the same format as the one stored. A wildcard search would need to be performed via the API.
The question is here is Zapier been designed to do wildcard searching for the Phone Numbers. If not, then you may be getting the failure here and why you are getting duplicate records from occurring. I am not a Zapier expert, so I do not know if you can toggle something.
I’m afraid it’s not “common sense”. It may be what you need but most users have cases where many contacts could or would have the same phone number…your situation is not representative of the norm. Industry standard is more closely tied to email addresses and even then you can have multiple contacts with the same email address. So in all of these cases, it’s up to the user to use best practices that match their need for their industry. One rule cannot cover all needs so it has to be left open so everyone can use it as they need to.
That all being said, it can be done with code solutions and some tools out there have limited options but for very specific needs, often a custom solution must be created.
Hi John,
The problem is that Zapier is set up to use that as a way to check for duplicates but infusion soft is now blocking that process.
Thanks so much,
Rachel Campbell
Marketing Director
6370 Magnolia Avenue, Suite 320**
Riverside, CA 92506**
Text: (909) 367-2020
Phone: (951) 683-3704 ext. 103
Fax: 951-683-3948
And it is common sense if you check by two options such as name and email to be able to check by phone and email or phone and name. It is logical.
Thanks so much,
Rachel Campbell
Marketing Director
6370 Magnolia Avenue, Suite 320**
Riverside, CA 92506**
Text: (909) 367-2020
Phone: (951) 683-3704 ext. 103
Fax: 951-683-3948
Hi, Rachel,
I guess I’m not clear how IS is blocking anything that can be done withh the api (which is how Zapier functions). Can you describe what you mean by IS is “blocking”? Because the api still allows for this.
Hi John,
Zapier allows for duplicate checking by phone and has the integration into Infusion Soft and it keeps getting an error from Infusion saying:
I set it up both ways but because it is only connecting as checking by name and email or email which is useless for Call Tracking, it is not allowing me to connect the system without creating huge amounts of duplicate contacts and never updating any contacts just creating new contacts that I then have to go in and merge. It is beyond frustrating.
Thanks so much,
Rachel Campbell
Marketing Director
6370 Magnolia Avenue, Suite 320**
Riverside, CA 92506**
Text: (909) 367-2020
Phone: (951) 683-3704 ext. 103
Fax: 951-683-3948
That message is not from a phone check. It’s from the method addWithDupCheck which has nothing to do with phone numbers. This would be on Zapier’s side if they’re indicating it’s to check by phone but using the wrong method to do so
Hi John,
Zapier has the advanced setting option to duplicate check.
I think the problem is that Infusion soft does not have the set up to check by phone numbers. It is frustrating for users. I am not sure why they do not have any ability to check by phone number for integrations or by anything other than email, email and name, (Both of which make sense) but the third email, name, and company is just useless! To anyone honestly! It would make much more sense to have a phone number option and I am now trying to find a way to make it work and once again Infusion is saying their way or the highway. Never listening to what customers actually need.
If there is a way to make this work that you know of then please let me know.
Otherwise I am back to the old stand by from InfusionSoft that is it always the other software and heaven forbid Infusion try to make the lives of users and customers easier in anyway.
I spent 8 months trying to get a simple webhook from Infusion that I eventually was able to use Zapier to create but the 8 months of phone calls and emails was because I could not get infusion to give me a simple answer and they kept giving the other company wrong information about what they needed to make it work. A simple answer of use Zapier and you can build a webhook that both platforms can use would have saved me 8 months of time. Instead they kept telling the other company that the software they were using “should work” and then not discussing why it was not working.
And now I can’t get a simple duplicate check.
This is why people leave. I am to the point that I am almost ready to pay a much higher price monthly AND go through a complete migration of our contacts and website forms AND rebuild all 75 campaigns for both law firms I handle to get a company that actually cares about helping customers!
I do realize you do not represent Infusion Soft and thank you for your insights.
I will be looking into whether we want to hire someone to build something that should already work or if I am ready to just start moving all the companies I work with. I will be discussing in the mastermind marketing director group. I know several have already left Infusion soft because of these issues. I just can’t believe that this company is so nonchalant about taking care of customer needs or even speaking to customers. Why they sent me here to post and then never respond says a lot about their lack of customer service or care.
Thanks so much,
Rachel Campbell
Marketing Director
6370 Magnolia Avenue, Suite 320**
Riverside, CA 92506**
Text: (909) 367-2020
Phone: (951) 683-3704 ext. 103
Fax: 951-683-3948
Rachel,
I am 100% certain the message you shared is from a call that has zero to do with phone numbers. If you’re getting that message when using a tool for checking by phone number, then it is zapier using the wrong call.
I have nothing to gain in defending IS and you are stuck on IS as the issue. Zapier has actually had a lot of issues lately. That call is in no way an attempt to check for dups by phone. The ONLY call that can be used for that is named dsQuery or just Query. That message will never come from making a call to query so Zapier is using the wrong method.
I use the calls every day of the year (literally) and they are working on Infusionsofts side.
Bumping this! We’ve attempted to work around this [1] but the need to use phone number as a primary identifier is just necessary.
I submitted this as a feature request recently, and was suprised to see Rachel’s post here not get addressed by Infusionsoft staff.
Infusionsoft team, please implement this!
[1] The work around was to put phone numbers followed by @zapier.com in the email field. We use zapier to send call data to infusionsoft similar to Rachel. Issue with this: is if we get the actual email address for the person, then we get duplicate records.
Bump… This issue is breaking infusionsoft for us.
I am not sure what you need. Infusionsoft has never done dupe checking by phone number. If some integration had the dupe checking by phone number and it is no longer working you should reach out to the integrator.
We left infusion soft for this and a few other reasons. They have known it breaks with phone numbers not dip checking for years. I spent 4 or 5 years begging them to fix this. They never do!
Sorry to hear that Rachel. I can understand your frustration.
I am not sure what you need. Infusionsoft has never done dupe checking by phone number. If some integration had the dupe checking by phone number and it is no longer working you should reach out to the integrator.
@bradb We need Infusionsoft to de-dupe by phone number. And add it to the API as well for the dedupecheck. I think many customers would appreciate this feature as well.
The api is capable of deduping by phone number if you write code to facilitate that response to dup checking by phone. I’ve written it for clients before. What the above messages were about is that they were contending that the addWithDupCheck method was (or should be) according to phone number and it’s only a check by email address.
So if code is written to check for all contacts with a specific phone number, then the array that is returned can be used to eliminate (delete) all contacts that qualify on those criteria…meaning possibly the newest ones? It could also be done to ‘merge’ the duplicate contact records. Since the query method can be used to do this, it would be especially redundant for Infusionsoft/Keap to make a special method for it.
And that is why I left infusion soft and tell other companies to just choose one that will work with phone integrations properly. Yours doesn’t and your coders refuse to hear the needs of the users. People want their Call tracking connected and your failing to make it work.