Merge duplicate contacts

Swimlane keeps one contact per LinkedIn identity, so duplicates are rare. When two records for the same person do exist, Swimlane can merge them, either automatically when a profile is refreshed or on demand across your whole workspace.

Why duplicates are rare

When a conversation, an import or a received invitation brings in someone who is already in your workspace, Swimlane updates the existing contact instead of creating a new one. Your workspace can't hold two contacts with the same LinkedIn ID.

When a duplicate can appear

LinkedIn identifies a person in more than one way: the public address of their profile, and an internal ID. A duplicate can appear when the same person reached Swimlane through both. The typical case is a CSV import, which only knows the public profile address, for someone whose record came from a synced conversation, which carries LinkedIn's internal ID.

Automatic merge on refresh

When you refresh a profile with Enrich with LinkedIn (on the contact record or in Bulk Actions), Swimlane reads all of the person's LinkedIn identifiers. If another record in your workspace already holds one of them, it is merged into the contact you refreshed, which is kept.

After a CSV import, refreshing the imported contacts is therefore the simplest way to clean up duplicates.

Merge duplicates across the workspace

1. Open any contact table, for example All Leads on the Lists page.
2. Tick at least one contact so that Bulk Actions appears. The selection itself doesn't matter.
3. Choose Deduplicate.
4. Read the confirmation and click to continue. A message then reports how many contacts were processed, merged and deleted.

What a merge does

• Swimlane looks for contacts sharing a LinkedIn identifier, across your whole workspace, including contacts your teammates work with.
• The oldest record is kept. Its empty fields are filled from the duplicate: name, email, phone, headline, location, photo, website, biography, company, job title, follower count and LinkedIn identifiers.
• The duplicate's activity, pipeline positions and reminders are moved onto the kept record. If both were in the same pipeline, the kept record's position wins.
• The duplicate is then removed.

Before you run it

• It can't be undone. There is no way to split a merged contact back into two.
• Check notes, tags and lists. They aren't carried over from the removed duplicate. Copy any note you want to keep, and after the merge check the kept contact's tags and lists.
• Fields aren't overwritten. When both records have a value, the kept record's value stays.
• It's workspace-wide. Tell your team before running it, since it also affects the contacts they work on.