Adding existing contacts should be prevented

API Q&A
1

Dear Developer Team,

I’m running a small business. I have 5 salesman and they have daily target which is adding at least 5 prospective contacts per day.
But there is a problem while adding contacts. When adding the existing contacts, the Infusionsoft doesn’t warn and prevent that. This is gonna be bad if they take care the same contacts/customers.

Can you develop the automatic warning and prevent it what adding the existing contacts? This will help a lot for many small businesses

Thank you so much.

2

So are we saying that if you use the same email address that an existing contact already uses, that it’s not just updating that contact but rather is creating a new one?

You may be able to prevent that with your own custom “add contact” webform in IS.

3

If I add new contact (using email or phone number) and that email or phone number is already used, so IS should prevent me and warn me. Can you show me how configure that.

Thank you so much

4

IS does NOT do any dup checking on phone numbers. It does have the ability to do so with emails but you have to pass that information to an IS hosted form so IS will know it’s for that contact. This is normally done with a hidden email field and then passed by GET or POST using the hidden fields name.

5

Hi @John_Borelli,

Could you elaborate at all on IS not checking duplicate phone values for contact addition? This is highly pertinent to some cleanup we’re doing to our contact records. I’m wondering if it is a design decision to explicitly not check duplicate phones (and if so what the reasoning is) or if it is simply not something that’s been considered or seen as valuable. In my business’s case, and I would image many others, the duplicate phone can often be more instructive of an unwanted duplication than the email. A means for toggling duplicate checking for phones would be a huge win for us.

Do you have any more insight on the thinking behind phone checking?

Thanks for your help!

6

@Brian_Burnley,

I’m not sure there is anything to elaborate on. IS doesn’t dup check contacts on phone numbers. If they did then that would give something to expound upon but it just doesn’t exist…not out of the box anyway.

It is possible to do this with some code and an http post (I’ve had clients that have asked for this) but it’s not natively part of IS’ functioning.

In seven years, I’ve only had about five requests for it so I don’t know what IS considers it to be in terms of value. You can submit it as a feature request at https://keap.com/tellus....obviously, the more they hear from people about a feature, the higher the priority should be to do it :wink: