Find and Merge Duplicate Contacts NOT based on Email Address?

[Joe_Cymerman]

We would like to search for duplicate contacts/users in our Database outside of the currently available Email, First Name, Last Name, Marketo Unique Name/Code in the Duplicate Fields filter. We use quite a number of custom fields in our Database, and have discovered many cases of duplicate users where they all have the same general information, but a differing email address, NPI number, and so on. Is this feature currently possible in Marketo?

[SanfordWhiteman]

3 choices of vastly differing risk & expense:

1. Temporarily move First Name and Last Name to other proxy fields, copy the dedupe fields into First Name and Last Name, run list, move everything back
2. Ask about Marketo's Merge product (extra $)
3. Use a 3rd-party app (extra extra $)

[Jo_Pitts1]

A fourth option (which might be an extension of item 3 in @SanfordWhiteman's response) is to export all the data (including Marketo IDs), do your merge analysis external to Marketo (in a nice DB for example), and come up with a list of 'master' and 'duplicate' records, and then fire this data at the Merge API (it is easy enough to write a data loader using something like Python (and the very usable libraries that are available for it), or the programming language of your choice.

I just did something of this nature a few days back for a client, so can testify that is is comparative straightforward (but not without risk).

Cheers