Better control over data submitted in forms (prevent existing good data from being spoiled)

As discussed in today’s DACH online meetup:

There are situations where known good data (e.g. from CRM, or at least DOI-verified submissions, maybe manually improved) should be protected from being overwritten by any form submission.

Exact requirements and strategies vary, may include e.g.

  • “no write to contact data before DOI”

  • “extend that to progressive profiling / or not?”

  • “improvement of data quality through external services”

  • “company matching based on (DOI-confirmed) email domain”

  • “catch duplicates even with different capitalization, typos, … yet support large enterprises with many similar subsidiaries, n:m contacts<-> companies relations, …”

  • “capture submitted data only in form submit data, allow transferring that to the contact later”

  • “option for manual review & approval”

My idea is:

  • create more complete picture of possible scenarios, i.e. requirements and strategies (also: what do other systems do?)
  • come up with a basic feature set for implementation within Mautic (and implement that)
  • provide guidelines for more flexibility (and achieving more sophisticated things) though external middleware, e.g. n8n