Customer Importer - Overwrite Fields with Blanks?

Contacts
1

Does anybody know how I can use the customer importer to overwrite fields with text to blank fields? I have a few messy contacts I’d like to clean up.

2

@ElJefe is the master of this.

1 Like
3

Thanks but I’ve not done any customer importing to speak of. Suggest you create a test contact or two, read the docs carefully, and run some experiments to see what works and doesn’t work. And when you got to do the real import, do a chunk at a time and check the results.

4

You can easily overwrite fields on customer records with data using their customer number as your key. However, blanks aren’t read by the importer.

I’ve re-imported customer email addresses with a file that contained only customer number and email addresses - every other column blank. It left the other data on the customer records intact and only changed the email.

maybe there’s a way to import a ‘space’ or something but I haven’t tested it.

5

Once upon a time when I was on your side of things and before the existence of the Do Not Contact flag in contact accounts, I imported a bunch of customers with the Source Code of Do Not Call. Things changed and I was asked to undo the import. You can’t. I settled for overwriting it with something benign like “.”.

PS you wouldn’t want to import to overwrite with blanks on customer import anyway. Er, at least I wouldn’t want that.

6

I do agree that for the vast majority of cases this is true. But when you have fields that really should be blank, there should be a less arduous way. I have some contacts that I evidently screwed up an import for, so their first/last or last/company is in the wrong place. After fixing names I still have data in fields that should have no data. Two ideas:

  1. An option at the import you can select to reset the customer data to match exactly what your file says, or

  2. A tag of some kind that you could put in your customer import file in the field you want to overwrite as blank.

7

Hey @danjimerson, you’re totally right. Can I ask you to submit that as a feature request? You’ll get a nice reply from Sarah. I promise.

Alternatively, maybe an invisible character (like a line break) can be imported to overwrite a field. If I have a few moments, I’ll test that today.

We’re all pretty much superusers in this thread so I see the value of having this functionality for people who will not misuse it. I would be worried if I asked anyone else to use that kind of functionality.

2 Likes