Decide which system holds the current contact details

What this means for your practice

Decide which system owns each shared field and when an incoming value may replace it. Treat conflicting updates as a defined business case, not a last-write accident.

Questions to take to your supplier

Ask the supplier to replay an older fictional submission after changing the contact number in the main record. Inspect which value survives and why. Staff need a visible correction route for conflicts, with enough history to explain the accepted change.

Agree the working process

List the shared fields that can change and assign a main record for each. Contact details, service choices and communication preferences may have different owners, so a single rule for every field may be too broad. Agree when a website submission should create a new value, suggest a correction or leave an existing value unchanged. The supplier should turn those business decisions into the connection behaviour, with uncertain cases visible to an authorised reviewer. Include a realistic sequence in testing: an initial submission, a later correction and then a delayed arrival of the older submission.

Ask staff to explain why the final value is the one they expect. Keep enough change history to investigate a disputed update without exposing unnecessary information. Review recurrent corrections by field; they can reveal an unclear ownership rule or a form that invites outdated details. The useful result is that colleagues know where to make a correction and can verify that connected tools follow that decision, rather than editing several places independently.

How to check the result

Count shared fields corrected because ownership rules were unclear.