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Contact Resolution and De-Duplication

How Rox Keeps Your CRM Clean and Your Sales Outreach Smarter 🚀

The Hidden Cost of Duplicates

Duplicate contacts aren’t just annoying: they can be costly. The same executive can show up multiple times across CRM, marketing systems, CSV imports, and enrichment tools, each with slightly different details. Without resolution, reps waste time chasing duplicates, outreach gets messy, and deals can even fall through.

That’s why we built Rox’s Entity Resolution Engine: a production-ready system that keeps millions of person records unified and accurate, so sellers always know they’re reaching the right contact.


The Challenge: One Person, Many Records

On the surface, it sounds simple: check if two records are the same person. However, being able to identify a person’s uniqueness poses several challenges. Many people have multiple emails or can change their emails - and the same goes for their LinkedIn profiles amongst other key identifiers.

Take John Smith across systems, who can be identified in all of the following ways:

Four different entries. One person. Without proper resolution, customer intelligence is fragmented and unreliable.


Our Approach: A Resolution Engine Built for Scale

We designed Rox’s contact resolution engine around three core principles:

  • Direct, Not Chained

    Every duplicate points directly to a single unified record. No confusing “chains” of references, no cascading lookups. Resolution is fast and predictable.

  • Smart Normalization

    People use multiple email variations. We normalize email formats to catch a high percentage of duplicates within the resolution engine, while still keep original data intact.

  • Source Trust Hierarchy

    Not all data sources are equal. CRM entries verified by sales reps and manual-input data outranks automated enrichment data. Our strict priority system ensures the most reliable source from the user’s perspective always wins.


Why It Matters for Sales Teams

While de-duplicating contact might not influence deals, it directly impacts outcomes:

  • No duplicate outreach that risks frustrating prospects

  • Clean CRM data that sales can trust

  • Speed at scale, with 95% of resolutions handled in under 1s

  • Self-healing records when identities change or sources conflict


Next Steps

  • Make the resolution process even faster. Move away from batch processing and stream de-duplicated contacts in real-time.

  • Org-chart based deduplication to build relationships between contacts.

  • Expect edge cases and partial failures — production data is always messy.


The Bottom Line

Contacts are the lifeline of the sales process. They’re how you open doors to new opportunities, advance deals through critical stages, and ultimately close with confidence. Contact deduplication solidifies the backbone of a CRM that works at enterprise scale. Rox’s engine processes millions of records daily, keeping data clean, trustworthy, and actionable, so your sales team never risks four emails to the same executive again. Behind every deal is a real person and they deserve smarter outreach.

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