When a contact is in a journey and a customer service representative merges the record with another existing one, they drop out of the journey because the contact that is in the journey is made inactive. A merge should actually move the journey participation to the merged record.

Example:

• A contact signs up for an event. They spell their name differently or use a different email address, so a new contact is created
• The contact starts down the event run-up journey, confirmation emails and event tickets
• Sales notices the duplicate contact and merges the new one with the existing, well-known contact

In this example, the contact that was new would be inactivated by the merge, so they would just stop going down the journey, so they would not get the important emails before the event. The merge logic does move the event registration record over to the existing contact, but the journey participation link does not move.

This needs to be improved. A merge indicates that the two records are actually the same, so the merged contact should continue down the journey.

A work-around suggested by Microsoft Support was to always merge with the newer contact. But that skews the sales data, for example the created on date, which is unacceptable. A customer that we've known for a decade should not have a created on date of just now!