HighLevel’s current duplicate-contact prevention creates a serious CRM data-integrity problem because contacts cannot share the same phone number when “Allow Duplicate Contacts” is disabled.

This is especially problematic for B2B users. Multiple employees at the same company often share one main office phone number. Each employee should be stored as a separate contact with their own name, title, email address, notes, opportunities, and communication history. However, HighLevel treats the shared company phone number as a duplicate identifier, preventing these individuals from being maintained as distinct contacts.

Enabling “Allow Duplicate Contacts” is not an adequate solution. While it permits multiple employees to share the company’s phone number, it also removes important safeguards and allows genuinely duplicate records—such as multiple entries for the same John Smith at the same company—to be created.

HighLevel should allow each location to configure how duplicate contacts are identified. Options could include:

Email address

Mobile phone number

First name + last name

First name + last name + company

A configurable combination of selected fields

Ideally, users should also be able to designate a phone number as a shared business or office number so it is excluded from duplicate detection.

The system could then prevent a genuine duplicate only when the selected fields match, while still allowing multiple individual contacts to share the same company phone number.

A CRM should distinguish between an individual contact’s identity and shared company information. Making duplicate-matching rules configurable would solve this problem without forcing users to choose between incomplete contact records and an uncontrolled database full of duplicates.