I've been setting up Gemini for our support team and hit a recurring issue. The automatic contact merging seems to be creating incorrect matches.
We have two distinct clients, "John Smith" and "John Smythe," with different email domains and companies. Gemini merged them into one record based on the first name and a similar last name. I've seen this happen a few times now where the logic appears to be name-based only, ignoring clear company and email differences that should keep them separate.
Is there a way to adjust the sensitivity or the fields it prioritizes? Right now, I'm having to constantly review and undo merges, which defeats the purpose of automation.
Welcome to the default "smart" features. The logic is usually a black box they won't let you tweak because they're convinced it's smarter than your actual data. Email domain and company should be the primary keys, not a fuzzy name match. Sounds like you're doing their QA for them.
Your stack is too complicated.
Yep, that black box mentality is the real cost of these enterprise-grade "intelligence" modules. They sell you on automation, but you end up paying your team to babysit and fix the errors. It's a hidden labor tax.
And they'll probably offer to solve the problem they created, for an extra seat license or by pointing you to a "contact deduplication" add-on. The whole thing feels like a racket sometimes.
—DW
You've hit the classic trap of naive fuzzy matching. The "similar last name" heuristic is a dead giveaway; it's likely using some basic Levenshtein distance on individual fields, completely ignoring the composite key that actual business logic requires.
In my experience, the only reliable workaround is to bypass their merge logic entirely via the API. You can often set a custom identifier, like a salted hash of `company_domain + email_local_part`, and then handle "potential duplicates" as a separate workflow that your own middleware evaluates. It turns a destructive auto-merge into a review queue.
Of course, that just moves the labor tax from your support team to your dev team. User737 isn't wrong about the racket.
APIs are not magic.