This feature is powered by Freddy AI, Freshworks’ AI-powered sales assistant. Freddy uses ML algorithms to continually learn from data stored in the web application and builds understanding to report duplicate records and maintain data hygiene in CRM.

Freddy AI detects duplicate contacts in your account to help you maintain clear and accurate data. The deduplication functionality, powered by Freddy AI, proactively detects and displays duplicate records using a smart match algorithm.

How does Freddy AI detect duplicate records?

Freddy AI searches your contacts and looks for matches between records by analyzing the following fields of each record:

• Last Name

• Name

• Company Name

• Email

• Work Number

• Mobile Number

Duplicates are detected by analyzing and matching on above fields with the primary record. When a contact has a duplicate identified, it is displayed as pill text on the landing page. 

Click on the pills to land on the Freddy AI Insights section. For example, in the following screenshot, records with matching email addresses, different versions of the same phone number, and possible nicknames are all detected as duplicates for the current or primary record. Matching records are ranked in descending order of relevance as duplicates.

In practice, Freddy AI detects duplicates in the following scenarios:

Once a set of duplicates is detected, users can execute one of the following actions:

• Merge: Merge allows users to move the values of a duplicate contact under the primary record and remove the duplicate. Merging the two records will bring all data such as email addresses and recent conversations into the primary record.
  
  Here’s how this works:
  Consider an example where there are multiple contacts that bear the name Robert Andrews, Bob Andrews, Rob Andrews. When you open one of these contacts, say Robert Andrews, Freddy AI detects and displays matching records as duplicates. When you merge, a duplicate record is merged with ‘Robert Andrews’ as the primary record.
  
  

• View & Edit fields: You can view the fields of the duplicates from the primary record to gather more context.
  
  

• Assign to: There are instances when two or more records may have been created for the same contact. In such a scenario, you can reassign those duplicate contacts to a single owner.
  
  

• Send email: If a duplicate has an email associated with it, you can send an email.
  
  

• Delete: The delete function deletes the duplicate record from your account.
  
  

• Not a Duplicate: If a record is not a duplicate, you can remove the duplicate record so that the record does not appear in duplicate results.

Freddy AI has some exclusions as well:

1. Common and generic names in the email ids, such as info@domain.com, careers@domain.com will not be detected as duplicates.

2. Other generic keywords include work, help, etc.

In such cases, even if there are two contacts with say info@domainname.com, they would not appear in either the duplicates section or in the smart connections section.

Note: Freddy AI is enabled by default on the web application. If you want  to disable Freddy AI from detecting smart matches, go to Admin Settings >  Language & Time Zones and uncheck the option ‘Check for duplicates through smart matches’ under the Freddy AI Settings section. This will restore your settings to the former deduplication feature.

Freddy AI does not detect contact duplicates when email id contains generic keywords like info, careers, work, help, etc. In such cases, even if there are two contacts with say info@domainname.com, they would not appear in either the duplicates section.
Smart connections section is intended to show only different contacts and assumes those with same email ids are duplicates and hence these email ids will not show there either.

If you would like to send us feedback on this feature, write to us at crm-support@freshworks.com