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Two records for the same person split their conversation history, tags and notes across separate profiles, which is confusing for your team and makes a contact's history look thinner than it really is. VGraple CRM prevents the most common cause of this automatically on your website chat widget, and merges the rest on request.
Merge duplicate contacts: first 5 of 8 steps
- 1A visitor uses your website chat widget
- 2The visitor identifies themselves
- 3VGraple CRM checks that email against your
- 4Their conversation carries over
- 5Spot the duplicate
Before you start
- Merging is available to every plan, since it fixes data quality rather than being a paid feature.
- Requesting a manual merge for two contacts you have spotted does not require any particular role or permission from your side; support carries out the merge on your behalf.
- Merging is permanent for the record removed: its conversations, tags, notes and other activity move to the surviving contact, and the removed record is not restorable afterward.
- A merge only ever combines two contacts within the same organisation; it cannot combine contacts across two separate VGraple CRM workspaces.
Steps
How the automatic merge works
A visitor uses your website chat widget anonymously. VGraple CRM creates a temporary "Website Visitor" contact so their conversation has somewhere to attach to.
The visitor identifies themselves, typically by typing their name and email into the chat widget's identify step, or a chatbot flow that asks for it.
VGraple CRM checks that email against your existing contacts. If it matches a contact already in your organisation, for example someone who previously messaged you on WhatsApp using that same email, the temporary visitor record is merged into the matching contact automatically, with no action needed from your team.
Their conversation carries over. The web chat conversation now shows under the same contact as their earlier WhatsApp history, so an agent opening either channel sees the full picture rather than a fresh, empty-looking profile.
Requesting a manual merge
- Spot the duplicate. This usually shows up as two separate rows on the Contacts page with the same name or phone number, or two conversations in the inbox that both seem to be the same person.
- Note both contacts' details (name, phone, email if visible, and roughly when each was created) so support can identify them quickly.
- Contact VGraple CRM support, Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 7 PM IST, with those details and which record you would like kept as the main one.
- Support merges the records. Every conversation, appointment, lead, note and custom field value from the duplicate moves onto the contact you keep, and the duplicate record is removed.
Why the automatic fix is narrow rather than general
Merging is a genuinely risky operation done wrong: combine the wrong two contacts and you attach a stranger's conversation history, appointments and notes to someone else's profile, with no easy way to tell after the fact which pieces belonged where. Because of that, VGraple CRM only merges automatically in the one case where the match is unambiguous, a web chat visitor who explicitly types an email address that exactly matches an existing contact's email. An exact match on an email address someone just typed themselves is about as safe as automatic identity resolution gets.
Example
A D2C store's customer messages on WhatsApp asking about an order, then weeks later visits the store's website and opens the chat widget as an anonymous visitor to ask a different question. When the widget asks for their email and they type the same one linked to their WhatsApp profile, VGraple CRM merges the new web chat conversation straight into their existing contact, so the agent who picks it up sees the earlier WhatsApp order conversation as history, not a blank profile.
Two contacts that look like duplicates for any other reason, same name but no shared email, two different phone numbers for one person, a contact created twice from separate CSV imports, all need a human to confirm they are actually the same person before merging, which is why those go through a support request rather than a self-serve button. This mirrors how most serious CRMs handle contact deduplication: automatic where the signal is unambiguous, reviewed by a person everywhere else.
What you will see
After an automatic web chat merge, the customer's web chat conversation appears seamlessly under their existing contact, with no separate "Website Visitor" entry left behind. After a manual merge from support, the surviving contact's history grows to include everything that was on the duplicate: every past conversation, any tags or notes that were not already present, and appointments or leads tied to the merged record, all reassigned rather than duplicated.
Settings and options
| Situation | Handled by | When it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Anonymous web chat visitor later provides an email matching an existing contact | Automatic merge | The moment the visitor identifies themselves in the chat widget |
| Two separately created contacts you have spotted as duplicates | Manual merge via support | On request, Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 7 PM IST |
| Tags present on both records | Kept once on the surviving contact, not duplicated | During any merge |
| Custom field values present on both records | The surviving contact's existing value is kept where both have one set | During any merge |
| Conversations, appointments, leads, notes, broadcast sends | Reassigned in full to the surviving contact | During any merge |
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A web chat visitor's history did not merge into their existing contact | The email they typed does not exactly match the email on the existing contact record | Confirm both records use the same email address, correcting a typo if needed, and contact support to merge them manually |
| I merged two contacts and now cannot find one of them by its old name | The merged-away record no longer exists as a separate contact; its history now lives under the surviving contact | Search by phone number or the surviving contact's name instead |
| Two WhatsApp numbers for the same person are showing as separate contacts | WhatsApp identifies contacts primarily by phone number, so two different numbers for one person are treated as two people unless merged manually | Contact support with both numbers to have them merged |
| A tag I expected on the merged contact is missing | This should not happen since tags carry over; check you are viewing the surviving contact, not a cached view of the removed one | Refresh the Contacts page and search for the contact again |
| I am not sure which of two contacts should be the surviving one | There is no fixed rule you need to apply yourself; tell support which one you would prefer to keep, or let them use the earlier-created record by default | Include your preference when you contact support |
Related reading
To avoid creating duplicates in the first place when importing customers in bulk, see importing contacts from CSV. For organising contacts once they are clean, see tags, notes and stages.