3 Super Simple Ways to Clean Up Your Contact List in WORKetc

Picture this: you’re making a follow-up call to a customer regarding a sales inquiry they made a couple of days ago. You find out, however, that two other members of your team had already contacted them and they’re now starting to get pretty irate with all the phone calls.

You quickly scan the customer’s activity history but can’t find any record of the two follow-up calls they told you about. After a bit of digging, you find out that there are three different contact records for the same customer in your CRM system, and each of them had been assigned to different agents!

Keeping a clean and organized contact list in your CRM would have prevented this scenario and the wasted time and effort that comes with it.

Here’s a quick look at the different ways you can clean up your data in WORKetc.

Smartlists and Tags

Tags are a quick and easy way to segment your contacts into groups and organize them more efficiently. When you’re looking to clean up a bunch of tagged contacts, you can use them to quickly filter and search through your contact list.

The “Email Bounced” default system tag can be especially useful here. This tag is applied automatically to a contact if an email sent to them is returned as undeliverable.

As with all tags, you can easily create a smartlist of all contacts with the “Email Bounced” tag and start updating your contact records accordingly. An even faster way is simply to filter your contact list using tags. If you don’t see the tag you want to filter for, just click “more” at the end of the visible tags list.

Filtering the contacts list using tags.

Since you can create as many tags as you want in WORKetc, you should consider creating a “For Deletion” or similar tag and apply it to contacts that you have deemed unneeded. These may be duplicates, dummy contacts that you created while testing the system, or contacts with just outright bad data.

You can then filter for all contacts with a “For Deletion” tag at a later time and start getting rid of them.

Multi-delete

Deleting multiple contacts in one go is straightforward. First, filter your contact list to find the contacts that you want to delete from the system. A “For Deletion” tag or similar, as suggested above, will make this part go much quicker.

Let’s say you’ve given 50 duplicate or dummy contacts the “For Deletion” tag. The contact list will normally show all available contacts in the system by default. By clicking “more” and choosing the “For Deletion” tag in the Tags field next to the contact list search box, you can filter the list to show only those contacts with the “For Deletion” tag.

Once your contact list is filtered to your liking, select which contact records you want to delete by clicking the checkbox to the left of the contact name.

You can also use the checkbox at the top of the contact list, right below the search box, to select all contacts in the list with one click. You’d better be sure that all the contacts displayed in the list are okay to delete, though!

Selecting and deleting multiple items.

Once all the contacts you want to delete have been selected, just click the downward-facing arrow next to the “select all” checkbox and click “Delete” in the drop-down menu that appears.

The Contact Removal Tool (accessible through the Contacts drop-down menu on the main WORKetc toolbar) is another easy way to mass-delete unneeded contacts.

This tool allows you to quickly select which contacts are to be deleted according to their tags. Clicking on the “For Deletion” tag, for example, will immediately select all contacts with that tag. You can also just click the checkbox next to “Contact” at the top of the contact list to select all contacts.

WORKetc’s Contact Removal Tool.

Contact Merging

When importing data into WORKetc, there are times when you accidentally end up with multiple contact records for the same person. This usually happens when that person has multiple email addresses.

For example, there might be two separate contact records for one person named Michael Smith, with one record tied to his work email address, michael@smithtech.com, while the other is tied to his personal email address, michael.smith@gmail.com.

Situations like this are annoying, but they can be fixed easily enough. One method is to manually add all the email addresses associated with the contact to one record.

In the scenario above, for example, you can add “michael.smith@gmail.com” to the contact record tied to Michael Smith’s work email simply by hovering over the contact record’s primary email, clicking the pencil icon that appears next to it, and then clicking the “Add new email” link.

Manually adding email addresses to contact records.

Once done, you can then go ahead and delete the contact record associated with his personal email address.

What if you want to add not just his personal email address to the contact record you want to keep, but any and all items in the personal contact record’s activity history as well? Then it’s time to merge the two contacts.

There are two ways of doing this. First, open the contact record that you want to merge from, which in this case would be the one with Michael Smith’s personal email address. Click on the “Manage Contact” drop-down at the top right and select “Merge”.

Contact merging in WORKetc.

You’ll then get a menu where you can select which contact you want to merge into — in this case, the contact record associated with Michael Smith’s work email address. Once you’re done, just click the “Merge” button. It’s that easy.

Alternatively, you can merge multiple contacts via the contact list. This is particularly useful when you’re merging more than two contacts into one.

Again, the first step is selecting which contacts you want to merge from. Then, click on the downward-facing arrow at the top of the contacts list and select “Merge”. On the next menu, select which contact you want to merge the selected contacts into and click “Merge”, and you’re done.

Contact merging via the contacts list.

By taking the time and effort to clean up your CRM’s contact list, you minimize run the risk of ending up with a disorganized and overwhelming system that, instead of helping you, ends up hindering your efforts to grow your business.

Garbage in, garbage out, or so the saying goes, so always make sure your data is as clean as possible.

How do you stay on top of and clean up your WORKetc contact records? Share your tips and tricks with the WORKetc community.