Merging duplicate customers

Introduction

From time to time, you may experience duplicate customers in the Bookings module. They can be easily identified and merged - or ignored if not a duplicate - using the Duplicated Customers report in the Bookings module's Data Cleansing reports, matching potential duplicates using a range of criteria.

Similarly, when viewing a customer profile, you will see an information message alerting you to a potential duplicate where there is an exact match for first and last name - with the option to Merge or to Ignore, which will dismiss the message and prevent it from showing again. You can undo a previously ignored potential duplicate in the above report.

The customer Merge workflow can also be used to optionally merge any two customers, even if they are not duplicates:

Simply search and select the Customer to delete:

Important: Merging customers is a destructive action - preserving the merged customer and deleting the other - and cannot be reversed. For those using ChurchSuite's multi-site functionality, care should be taken when merging customers that belong to different sites to avoid mismatches between the retained customer site/s and the site/s of their related bookings.

Merging duplicate customers

Selecting Merge from any of the three contexts described above opens the Merge customer pop-up showing the Customer to keep on the left and the Customer to delete on the right, with the option to Swap them if necessary. You can now selectively choose which details from either customer to retain in the merged customer (unselected details will be removed with the customer being deleted) - only fields with differing details are shown selectable - details that are the same are not shown.

The details you can selectively retain for the Customer to keep will depend on whether the customer to keep is In the Address Book or Not in the Address Book - a customer merge will never change an Address Book contact's details, it will only affect the details retained for the merged customer.

In the example below, the customer to keep is In the Address Book - the customer on the left - so only basic customer details are available to selectively choose the best details to keep for this contact-linked customer:

In the following example, the customer to keep is Not in the Address Book, which means you can choose from a wider range of customer details to selectively keep. Remember, only details that differ are shown selectable - details that are the same for both customers are not shown.

Having reviewed and selected the details to retain for the customer to keep, click Save to complete the merge. This process cannot be undone! A change log is added against the merged customer:

A delete log is maintained in the Deleted Customers report:

What data is merged?

In addition to the detailed selected to be retained for the merged customer, the following additional customer data is also merged and retained.

• Customer tags
• All links to past and future customer bookings and charges
• Customer Notes - including any Note visibility restrictions (e.g. restricted to "Just Me" or a particular User Group).
• Communication logs
• Change logs
• Flow tracking