Contacts: How can I import contacts with a Company Name only?

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rstoeber420 asked Apr 23, '16 phil-correia3929 commented Dec 21, '16

Contacts: How can I import contacts with a Company Name only?

I have a lot of contacts like restaurants, or company tech support numbers (Verizon, Go Daddy, etc) where the contact has no first name or last name. When importing my CSV file I get an error about missing information - it says all contacts must have EITHER first name, last name OR company.

After the import is completed none of the contacts with only a company name appear in my contact list.

Is the error message wrong? Is something special required for importing contacts that have only a company name?

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Answer 1 · 2016-04-28T16:01:47Z

mike answered Apr 28, '16

Hi Robert, Can check and see if your CSV file has any of the following special characters? If so you'll need to remove them.

<, >, /, ".

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Answer 2 · 2016-04-28T16:45:02Z

rstoeber420 answered Apr 28, '16 mike commented Nov 27, '17

Really? Are you sure the / is not allowed? That appears in every website address and many of my contacts have a website. Also, when I do a normal export from Google Contacts there is a column heading called TTY/TDD and I have been importing that with no problems.

Also, are you saying the double quote mark is not allowed in a CSV file? That appears in every standard CSV file around fields that contain embedded commas.

Anyway, I never remove either of those and my file imports absolutely correctly. There are no missing entries or missing data on any of the imported entries so I don't think those "special characters" are causing my problem.

What I'm seeing is very, very consistent - every contact that is like a restaurant or another business where I only have the company name, phone and sometimes the address, will not import. If I put an x in either the first name or last name of the restaurants they will be imported.

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mike commented · Apr 28, 2016 at 05:26 PM

Sorry. I should have been more specific.

NOTE: Import will fail if a contact name on your list has the following symbols: <, >, /, ". Please remove these four prohibited symbols from the contact names,

See: Importing Personal contacts in your RingCentral account

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rstoeber420 commented · Apr 28, 2016 at 11:54 PM

My contact names and company names contain no special characters.

Again, the problem is specifically with importing contacts that have blank first and last names. No contacts with only a company name will import. Everything else is working properly.

So either your documentation is wrong, or your contact import code is not working.

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kim commented · Apr 29, 2016 at 07:11 PM

Robert- thank you for the additional information. Do you have a case number we can follow up with? If not, please open a case and let us know the case number.

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rstoeber420 commented · Apr 29, 2016 at 09:40 PM

Case # 04574272

I was promised a response in 24 hours. It has now been 4 DAYS with no update.

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mike commented · Apr 29, 2016 at 10:19 PM

Hello Robert, I see from your case notes an agent tried to contact you. Can you update the case with notes if there's a window of time or particular number they can try and reach you at?

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Answer 3 · 2016-04-30T23:16:35Z

rstoeber420 answered Apr 30, '16 phil-correia3929 commented Dec 21, '16

OK, after several hours of experimenting with various CSV file formats and options, I think I have discovered the problem. It's not that my records are being skipped during the import.

The situation is that when importing records, RingCentral thinks that all records with a blank first and last name are duplicates. In other words, every record that has only a company name will overwrite the previous record that only had a company name.

This behavior, in my humble opinion, is incorrect since the company names are different so the record clearly isn't a duplicate.

The workaround is to select the option that says "Keep current existing record and add new record imported from import file" but that could introduce actual duplicates, so I prefer importing with the option "Overwrite existing record with the new record."

I will post this under a separate thread as well so that it's easier to find.

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phil-correia3929 commented · Dec 21, 2016 at 06:29 PM

Why can't we just use an API to link from a CRM or other database and create these new records in an automated manner?

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kim commented · May 02, 2016 at 02:30 PM

@Robert - Thank you for the additional information, and for creating an Idea request for the product team to look at and review for the future.

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regina213 commented · May 02, 2016 at 02:46 PM

I have had to handle duplicates by creating a master contact sheet from all of our users' inputs, then removing duplicates in excel before importing them to RC. Very labor intensive.

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