Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...

Data Enrichment through CSV Upload?

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by honeybear

105

Hi community -- Is there a way to upload a CSV of data (ie. customer phone numbers) to enrich data for leads that already exist in the CRM?

When I upload a CSV that contains lead data for a lead that already exists, Dynamics CRM gives me the option to not create a duplicate, which is great. I would then like the CRM to fill in any null fields if I'm uploading data that doesn't yet exist for that lead, identifying the lead by email address.

Right now the behavior is if the lead already exists in the CRM, the CRM ignores all the data for that lead entirely during the upload.

thanks for your help!

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (0)

LuHao 40,892 on at

Like (1)

Report

Hi partner,

In my opinion, this is probably impossible. Currently I have not found the good solution.

D365 does not have this function, and it is very difficult to implement it in D365. So I recommend that you export the data of Lead to Excel, merge the records in Excel, and then import it into D365. That is to say, the steps of merging are completed in Excel rather than when imported into D365.

In fact, this requirement can be divided into two parts, import data and merge data.

D365 has the function of merging data, but this is performed manually one by one and cannot be automated.

Then there's an issue of merging records to determine which is the master record.

In summary, it is not appropriate to implement import and automatic merging in D365.

When exporting data from D365 to Excel, columns A to C of Excel will contain the identification information of each record.

When adding a new record in Excel, these three columns have no data. So we can use columns A to C as the identification of the master record.

However, since I am not proficient in Excel, I did not find a way to automatically fill the new record data into the blank cells of the existing duplicate records, even if it is theoretically feasible.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Dhalia 14 on at

Like (0)

Report

You will need to hire someone who will automatically fill the new record data.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Baxafer 9 on at

Like (0)

Report

It’s complicated in Dynamics to divide the old and new information. I tried to merge the already existing lead with a new one by using different codes. The whole process turned into a complete mess. It took me a while to fix the chaos and return the old database.

In fact, I expected the process of lead data enrichment to be a more interesting one. In order not to destroy my brain with how dynamics works, I simply googled companies that automatically enrich CRM with necessary data. A whole bunch of companies appeared to be available.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Pedro Sacramento on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi honeybear

If I understood correctly, the behavior that you are describing happens because you're always starting from Excel, and Dynamics 365 validates if you're importing existing data or not. When importing a file, the import mechanism will look for the first few columns of the record (typically hidden) to match the IDs of those records. If that information doesn't exist it will try to create new records, it also asks first if you want to allow duplicate, because you choose not to, nothing happens because the validation will check if records with the same name/information already exist. In some situation you may even have been creating duplicate records without being aware.

Easiest way to achieve what you're looking for, is to create a view with the fields that you want to update (if it doesn't yet exist), export the file to excel, add the missing information to the fields/records and finally import the file again. The process is described here Import data in model-driven apps - Power Apps | Microsoft Docs. This way, you'll just to updates to existing records, and it will only update the new information that you've added to each one. You can also explore doing the changes using Excel Online which is described in the previous mentioned article. You may also want to start first with exporting just a few records to test this and not the entire list of records, you have options such as exporting just the page that is displayed or exporting the entire list of results.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No