Merging Duplicate Profiles
Last updated: 23rd May, 2022
🎓 GoSquared offers two methods for merging duplicate user profiles:
➡️ Manual Profile Merging
➡️ Automatic Profile Merging
Manual Profile Merging
🙌 Profile merging helps keep all your customer conversations and data in one place.
When a new visitor starts a conversation, we create an anonymous profile for them. If the same visitor then switches device (say from their phone to their laptop), we create a second profile for them because we can't be certain that it's the same person chatting.
This means that you potentially have two or more profiles for the same user – which can get messy. To prevent this, you can merge duplicate profiles together.
Merging profiles will combine the online activity and chat history of the two profiles into one feed.
Merging Profiles
If you spot a duplicate profile whilst you're chatting in Inbox, just click the merge button at the top of the sidebar.
Once you've selected the source lead, you can search using any criteria (name, company, email etc) to find the destination lead you wish to merge into.
If conflicts exist (e.g. if the duplicate profiles have different job titles), data from the destination profile will be kept.
Note: a merge cannot be undone. Be careful to make sure both leads you combine are correct!
Automatic Profile Merging
Having a customer's information to hand is vital for responding quickly and personally to Chat conversations.
That's why we built Inbox on top of the GoSquared 'Contacts' platform; so that the customer's full history and profile information is associated with their conversation. Storing the Chat history also means that your customers can always pick up the conversation from where they left off.
An anonymous profile becoming identified
To ensure the experience is consistent for all of your visitors, we create a new People profile when an anonymous visitors start a conversation with you. This new profile will be given a random name, avatar and ID number.
If the anonymous user leaves their email address in the Chat, we will use their email to automatically update the anonymous profile with information we can find from their social profiles.
If you are using the identify function (usually when the user logs in or registers for your site), GoSquared will automatically merge the anonymous chat profile into the identified profile.
Merging profiles from different devices
GoSquared can keep track of a conversation across multiple devices (i.e. mobile, laptop, iPad etc).
When a new visitor starts a conversation, we create an anonymous profile for them. If that same visitor then switches device (say from their phone to their laptop), we create a second profile for them as we can't be certain that it's the same person chatting.
This means that you potentially have two or more profiles for the same user – which gets messy.
To avoid this, as soon as the visitor signs up for your service (or logs in), use the GoSquared 'identify' function. This updates the anonymous profile to an identified profile containing all the user's details.
After 'identifying' a customer, GoSquared will keep things tidy for you by automatically merging together all of the messages and data from the separate profiles into one profile.
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