I've been experimenting and looking through the help files, but have not been able to find an effective way of updating contacts via import. In Sf, you can import the email column and the column(s) you want to update and it will match the email and append the fields on those contacts. Is there a way to set this up in CRM 365?
The practical application at the moment is this: We have an agency calling on a list who have sent back an Excel that tags contacts as No Longer With Company. As I have a rather large database, I don't want to have to try to export them all and cross reference in Excel in order to mass update them. I also don't want to go through the rather roundabout process of creating a Marketing List to hunt them all down and update them that way.
It seems like there would be some way to set up the Duplicate Detection and Import function to do this without the workarounds.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
Hello,
Yes, you are on the right path of combining import (documented here) together with duplicate detection (documented here). I hope the documentation helps you to succeed with this task.
But in your scenario you I believe you like not only to update the account field of the contact in order to detach the contact, but potentially also delete the email, if the contact has given his corporate email address. If the agency has reached out via phone, it might also have found the phone number to be incorrect now. And most importantly you might want also consider reseting the consent the contact has given for communication before.
Those activities sound like more than a simple import and duplicate detection and require conditional operations to update the data appropriately and tag them for dedicated re-connection and re-consenting reach outs.
In this context, Dynamics 365 for Marketing is and application from Microsoft that features consent management and can help you to design marketing reach out to audiences that currently do not have the required consent.
André Arnaud de Cal...
291,996
Super User 2025 Season 1
Martin Dráb
230,853
Most Valuable Professional
nmaenpaa
101,156