CRM sync and conflicts
What Incenti creates in your CRM when someone submits a form, how contacts, organizations, and properties are matched, why submitted values are sometimes kept out, and how to retry a failed sync.
Before you start
- This happens on its own. Every response submitted to one of your forms is put through your CRM in the background — you don't start it, and there's no setting to turn it off.
- Which answers feed which record comes from the form's field mapping, set in the form builder. A question that isn't mapped to a CRM field is stored as an answer and nothing more.
- A response created from a document your own account uploaded skips all of this — see Create a response from a document.
What gets created or updated
When a response is submitted, Incenti works through the submission in order.
Contacts
The primary contact is matched on email address, ignoring case and surrounding spaces. A match tops up the existing contact; no match creates a new one. Any other contacts the form collected are matched the same way and attached to the response with their role.
A brand-new contact is also linked automatically to an organization whose domain matches the contact's email domain, if you already have one.
Organizations
The organization is matched on its name. A match tops up what's already there; no match creates a new organization, seeded with the domain from the primary contact's email — but only when that's a business address, never a personal mailbox like gmail.com. The website answer fills the organization's website, and its domain too if that was still blank.
The primary contact is added to the organization as a member and marked as its primary contact, unless the organization already has a different primary — that one is kept.
Addresses
Main, mailing, and other addresses from the form are written onto the contact and the organization.
Properties
A property is matched on its street address plus city. Without both of those in the submission, nothing is created at all — a property record with no identifiable address could never be matched again and would just seed duplicates. Every property the submission describes is linked to the response; if the same address is entered twice, you get one link, not two.
Files and industries
Files a respondent uploaded into an Upload question become Documents attached to the response, and to the matched contact and organization, so they show up on those records too. Industries chosen on the form are added to the contact and organization — added, never replaced, so an existing record keeps the industries it already had.
Why submitted values are sometimes ignored
Incenti fills blanks. It never overwrites something your CRM already holds.
If a submission gives a value for a field that already has a different value, the existing value stays and the submitted one is set aside and recorded. On the response's detail page a CRM sync conflicts card lists every one of them: "These submitted values were not applied because the CRM already had different data."
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Record | Which kind of record it was: Contact, Organization, Contact address, Organization address, or Property |
| Field | The field on that record |
| Existing value (kept) | What your CRM already held, which is what it still holds |
| Submitted value (discarded) | What the respondent sent, which was not written |
Nothing is applied for you. If you want the submitted value, open that contact, organization, or property and edit the field yourself.
Sync status and retrying
The CRM Sync column on the Received tab, and the badge beside the status on the detail page, show where a response has got to:
- Sync pending — the background job hasn't finished. This is also what a response shows for the first moments after it arrives.
- Synced — everything completed, including attaching uploaded files.
- Sync failed — it gave up after retrying.
A failed sync puts a circular-arrow Retry CRM sync icon next to the badge on the detail page. Click it, then Retry Sync in the Retry CRM Sync? dialog: "This will re-run the CRM sync for this response." The badge returns to Sync pending while the whole pipeline runs again from the stored answers. Re-running is safe — matching is repeated the same way, so records already created are matched rather than duplicated.
What happens next
- Everyone active on the account that owns the form is emailed and notified in the app when a response arrives, whether or not the sync has finished.
- Contacts, organizations, and properties created this way are ordinary CRM records from that moment on. Removing the response later does not remove them.
- A conflict is a record of a decision already made, not a task queue — it stays on the response until someone re-runs the sync.
Common questions
Q: Why was a new contact created when we already had that person? A: Contacts are matched on email address alone. A respondent who typed a different address — a personal one, or a new work address after changing jobs — looks like a new person. Merge or tidy the duplicate in Contacts.
Q: Why was a duplicate organization created? A: Organizations are matched on name, exactly. "Ridgeline Manufacturing" and "Ridgeline Mfg. Inc." are two different organizations as far as matching is concerned.
Q: Why wasn't a property created from this submission? A: Because the submission didn't include both a street address and a city. Those two are the minimum needed to match the property again later, so without them nothing is created.
Q: What does "fill blanks only" actually mean? A: If your CRM field is empty, the submitted value is written into it. If it already has any value, that value is kept and the submitted one is listed as a conflict instead. Your existing data is never replaced by a form submission.
Q: The sync failed — will I lose the response? A: No. The answers are stored the moment the response is submitted; the sync is a separate background step. Click Retry CRM sync on the response to run it again.
Q: Does my document response create contacts too? A: No. A response you create by uploading your own document skips contact, organization, address, property, and industry creation entirely.
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