Preventing duplicate users in your CRM

Overview

When a user registers on our platform, they provide as a minimum their full name and an email address. Once created in our system, they'll automatically be assigned a unique ID. If you maintain a CRM of prospect information, it's possible that you might already have information on an individual but they might have used different information for both platforms, as such, they'll be treated as different people and when imported back into your CRM, you'll end up with 2 records for one individual.

To address this, you can use an optional query parameter of ext_uid=[CRM ID] in the URL so that when a user is pushed to Vepple, say from an email, we can catch their external ID and save it in their Vepple profile when they create an account. In that way, when you go to merge them back into your CRM, you'll be able to see that the two accounts are in fact the same individual.

Example

James has registered with Vepple University's CRM system using his school email address, james@school.ac.uk. His ID in Vepple University's CRM system is 007. James is sent an email through Vepple University's CRM platform saying he should attend an event hosted on Vepple. The link is as follows:

https://tour.vepple.ac.uk?ext_uid=007

James clicks the link and registers onto the Vepple platform using the "Sign in with Facebook" option, as such, he registers onto Vepple using his personal email address james@personal.com. His ID in Vepple is 123.

Ordinarily, when the captured data from James' profile was exported and then re-imported back into the CRM, a new record would be created as two different email addresses have been used. However, in this instance, James' profile in Vepple (ID 123) would have stored the fact that his external ID (taken from the URL he clicked) was 007. As a result, when James' Vepple behaviour (ID 123) is imported into the CRM, it can be loaded into his existing profile (ID 007) which can be updated to show James has two email addresses.

Implementation

Simply add a query parameter of ext_uid=[CRM ID] to any Vepple link and it'll automatically bind to the profile created in that session when the user registers. To do this, look at the URL that you're wanting to link them to; if it already contains a ? then you'll simply add: &ext_uid-123 to the end of the URL and if it doesn't have a ? you'll add ?ext_uid=123, for example:

https://www.vepple.ac.uk/?ext_uid=123

or

https://www.vepple.ac.uk/?subject_area=chemistry&ext_uid=123

Once the external ID is captured by the system, it will automatically be stripped from the URL. This is to prevent multiple people signing up with the same external ID in the case that the URL is shared.

N.B. The external ID will only persist in memory for the active browser session. This means that if a user clicks on a link including their external ID but then refreshes the page PRIOR to creating an account, it won't be saved.