People Merge - Automate Person/Contact Merges via Rules Engine or SFDC Connector Trigger
There is still a significant manual bottleneck regarding Person/Contact merges. While the Salesforce Connector allows us to "Delete orphaned records" when a contact is merged/deleted in SFDC, this is a "blunt instrument" that results in data loss. To maintain the integrity of Timeline entries, CTAs, and Attributes, we are forced to use the People > Merge tool manually or use the Unification tool which is again extremely manual.
The Problem: My organization sees a high volume of contact merges in Salesforce weekly. Currently, there is no way to automate the "Merge" action in Gainsight. This leaves me with two bad options:
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Auto-Delete via Connector: Lose historical context for that contact.
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Manual Merge: Spend hours every week manually processing records in People Merge or Unification which by the way won’t even work for me because it doesn’t .
The Solution Needed: We need the ability to trigger a Merge Action within the Rules Engine (or directly via the SFDC Connector). Since Salesforce has already identified the "Winner" and "Loser," Gainsight should be able to programmatically:
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Re-parent Timeline activities and CTAs to the Winning GSID.
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Merge the Person records without manual Admin intervention.
Business Impact: At our current volume, this is a massive drain on Admin resources and creates a delay in "Source of Truth" data for our CSMs, our programs, etc.
My Current Workaround: I created a report in Reports to send to me daily with the Contact History object in SFDC. For unknown reasons, it stopped sending to me once we were reconnected, so I haven’t remembered to check it for a while. I just pulled the data, and since reconnection, we are averaging over 50 merges per day. That is a HUGE time suck for my day to manually merge all of those. I realize we may be an extreme example, but the point still stands that it would be a huge improvement to Admin quality of life to create a more automated mechanism to do this work.