Simple duplicates elimination for Bitrix24 CRM

Various duplicate entities are a true punishment for any CRM system, and Bitrix24 is not an exception. At first glance, it seems there is nothing critical, as everything can be reviewed and corrected. In reality, duplicates may cause a lot of damage, especially to a company with a huge staff: team members might be working with duplicates of different entities without even knowing if this is this is the same client or the same transaction. This was the situation faced by an Avivi customer from the United States of America, when duplicates damage caused a loss of thousands of dollars. To eliminate this issue, our company has created an easy-to-use functionality that may be useful to all Bitrix24 users. 

Duplicate entities creation can not be avoided for many reasons. In general, there are several main reasons to be highlighted: CRM Leads, Contacts, Deals or Companies:

• Automatic entities creation. Clients enter the system through various communication channels and are recognized based on specific identical data. If, for instance, the Lead was created out of CRM form, with the name, phone number and e-mail indicated, then, upon subsequent request, say via WhatsApp channel, a duplicate may occur: there will be no data on which the system may verify in the database for recognition;

• Human factor. People enter data manually and do not pay attention to the system's notifications regarding the duplicates. 

• Various errors. Any system can fail and not retrieve information in time, which also contributes to cloning. 

The worst thing about duplicates is the distortion of the true business status. First, duplicates affect the statistics and correct report data. Also, CRM entity, which stores information about clients and orders, is affected. Various data is stored on various entities, which prevents seeing the whole picture at once. Moreover, the duplicates mess with the employees' work and that can affect the client: for instance, one individual may be offered several times irrelevant goods and services by different managers, which, at best, will only irritate the client.

Bitrix24 developers are well aware of the duplicates issue and offer a tool for automatic management and correction. In general, the functionality may solve the issue, but it will only be relevant to the early work stages in CRM because of the following:

• The tool finds and fixes all duplicates at once. For instance, you are not only unable to check a specific Lead or Contact, but also all the clones that need to be tackled immediately. If there are too many duplicates, the WHOLE Bitrix24 database would need to be reviewed;

• The management is carried out according to the three parameters only: name, phone number and e-mail address. As you can see, it's not enough to effectively search for clones;

• Automated tool independently selects one of the entities, where your duplicate information will be combined. If Bitrix24's selection does not meet the user's needs — the latter is affected;

• A lot of different data can simply not be combined at all. For example, the automated duplicates control will not transfer the history, leaving only the information from the final entity.

Since the automated duplicates combination did not meet the business needs of our clients, Avivi received a requirement to develop the customized tool of the Bitrix24 on-premise edition. Our team developed the functionality logic, suitable for absolutely all entities of the system. For a specific client, only Contact and Companies were of a high importance: a new button appeared in the interface upper menu; it allows to launch scan and combine unspecified duplicates, but not the whole database. 

The main advantages of our tool are:

• Individual selection of entities for merging and the user's right to independently select the final entity. The amount of clones involved in this process is indefinite;

• The possibility to display only various information. Fields with shared identical data can be hidden to not mislead the user;

• Individual selection of fields to be merged. Most probably, the duplicates will contain unnecessary information that don't need to be transferred;

• Process algorithms are optimized, so the merging process will not take long;

• The functionality does not cover other Bitrix24 components and does not interfere with the system. For the same reason, our code can face box edition updates without losing its capability with every new release.

Avivi's solution is also particularly flexible, which will allow you to customize the work of this add-on specifically to the needs of your business. Our experts will analyze your business processes and make sure that the Duplicate management process is truly easy and effective. 

Thus, do not wait for the clones to attack — take advantage of Avivi's solution and solve the CRM duplicates issue once and for all.