We’re excited to introduce improvements to our duplicate matching formula. As you know, this formula detects potential duplicate contact records (both individual and organization contacts) when new records are entered into your database via Quick Entry, Bulk Upload, and other sources.

Two or more records that share enough common attributes to be considered likely duplicates are a "match" and relevant information is added to the existing contact, rather than creating a new, redundant one.

The changes being introduced increase our ability to find more matches that may have previously gone undetected. This means your outreach efforts will be stronger and more targeted, your administrative work more efficient, and your reports cleaner and more accurate.

This update focuses on the following areas:

- Phonetically similar Last Name or Surname values. This allows us to catch typos and data entry errors, mishearing, misspelling, punctuation errors, and special character encoding errors.

- Nickname/First Name matching. This allows us to match on the Nickname field, and match Nicknames to First Name values, as they are commonly used interchangeably. This is only available through our Duplicate Analysis & Reporting services.

- Strongest match. We’ve updated the match-type check order to provide the strongest matches first.

- Efficiency. We’re able to return results faster with less performance impact.