5 of The Best Apps to Eliminate Duplicate Contacts

Maintaining a contact database with high data integrity is essential for every company. Your data must be reliable, accurate, and complete or you risk frustrating your customers with incorrect information, not being able to provide personalized services, and losing confidence in your reporting.

One of the biggest threats to data integrity is duplicate contacts in your database.

In many cases, duplicate contacts are caused by human error. A team member can misspell a contact’s name, causing it to be added twice. It can also be caused by a contact filling out a form with a different email address or phone number.

In short: double contacts can be a real pain. No company wants to have to deal with them, but the good news is that you must not. Here is what you need to know to get rid of duplicate contact information for good.

The best apps to remove duplicate contacts

Some apps have built-in deduplication features to find and banish annoying duplicates by merging or deleting them.

HubSpot, for example, has a handy deduplication tool that uses AI to find duplicate contacts and companies in CRM. Google Contacts and iCloud also have useful deduplication features built in. It’s always a good idea to start with the functionality of your apps and clean your data at the source.

However, many apps do not have built-in deduplication features or are limited in their quality. For most businesses, it makes sense to choose a dedicated data quality and cleansing app that works across multiple apps.

To avoid wasting time, money, and energy fixing duplicate contacts and how they affect your business, here are five of the best apps to help you fix and avoid duplicates.

1. Deduplication

For: HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive

Dedupely helps remove duplicates from three of the most popular CRM platforms: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. It’s a really easy to navigate platform and has multiple filters to flag possible duplicates for first name, last name, email, company, and more. It also finds duplicates through accurate, fuzzy, and similar matching to spot problems that other systems would miss.

2. DemandTools from Validity

For: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce

DemandTools is a CRM data quality suite that helps companies optimize their data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

It includes maintenance tools, cleanup tools, and discovery tools for comparing external data with the CRM and for bulk email verification.

3. RingLead

For: Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua and Marketo

RingLead is a powerful data quality solution for cleansing data, stopping dirty data at the source, enriching contact records with new information, and directing leads to the right person at the right time.

It offers one-click integrations with Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo.

4. Departure

For: selected marketing and sales automation apps, collaboration tools, data services and infrastructure platforms

Openrise’s data orchestration platform automates key processes, including data cleansing and enrichment, deduplication, lead routing, and attribution, to make your campaigns more successful.

It integrates with many popular marketing and sales automation apps and collaboration tools like G Suite, data services like Cleabit, and infrastructure platforms like MySQL.

5. Contacts +

For: Google Contacts, iCloud and Outlook

Are you struggling to manage different contacts in your Google, iCloud, and Outlook apps? Contacts + is a helpful app that centralizes and syncs contacts between Google Contacts, iCloud and Outlook so you always have the latest information about the app and device you are using.

Not only is it a great way to sync your address books, but it also has sophisticated deduplication algorithms to help identify duplicate contacts even if they are not obvious to you or other apps.

Prevent duplicates when synchronizing data

The tools we’ve talked about here are amazing additions to your tech stack when it comes to managing and organizing your contact databases. However, another important step in contact management is syncing your contact information in two ways.

Operations Hub is a two-way contact syncing tool that also provides valuable benefits in avoiding and merging duplicate contacts.

When you create a sync between your apps, e.g. For example, Google Contacts and HubSpot, you can choose which app contains the relevant data to be selected in the event of a conflict. This creates a “single source of truth” in your data: one of the benchmarks of a healthy database.

Operations Hub also defines contacts by their email address, which is a great way to avoid duplicates. And if, for example, you have a contact named “Bill” in one app and another a contact named “William” – both are attached to the same email address – the tool merges and enriches both contact records.