Why CircleBack Doesn’t Offer Mass Contact Updates

We’ve received a ton of feedback since CircleBack launched, and, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, we take each piece of feedback into consideration for the betterment of the product. Because of your questions and comments, we’ve made a lot of changes, and here are a few of note: we updated our UI, added new sort / view modes, gave you the ability to manage the duplicates we merge for you automatically, and have even discovered a neat hack to allow CircleBack to manage your LinkedIn contacts.

Unfortunately, there’s one feature we simply can’t offer at this time: the ability to mass-accept CircleBack updates.

I mean, sure, we’d like to (and of course we have the technical ability), but there’s a very good reason that we don’t: because the quality of your contact updates would suffer.

Because CircleBack runs on an Artificial Intelligence learning engine, your feedback on the updates we offer (whether you choose to accept or ignore them) contributes to the high-quality information we’re able to suggest to the CircleBack community. Our fear with mass updates is that, if everyone simply “mass accepts” these changes, the quality of the feedback CircleBack receives will be reduced because we won’t know if we’re right or not, thus lowering the quality of CircleBack updates.

Please believe it’s not us being unresponsive on this one. If there’s any way we can implement it while still maintaining the accuracy you expect from CircleBack, we’ll find it.

Thanks for your support.

And, if you haven’t already, give CircleBack a try on iOS or Android. We have a strong commitment to delivering clean, complete, updated contacts, and we work hard to ensure that the app you want is the app we offer.

CircleBack:

View Comments (3)

  • Really want the bulk updates, it is too much to do hundreds manually when first getting started. How about a threshold where you can bulk update at say 50 or more. I won't use this app otherwise.

    Cheers,

    Dan

    • Dan,

      Sorry I'm just seeing this. It really is important to us to get the bulk updates too, and we're working hard on a solution. The problem is that we don't want to do what the other companies who offer this service do: offer the updates and destroy the integrity of your address book in the process.

      It's a fine line and something that we will absolutely solve. Thanks for bearing with us.

  • I'm with Dan on this one- there needs to be an automatic approach at the start. I also have 500+ contact updates, and sifting through those is not realistic.

    If you have machine learning behind this, why don't you have a confidence threshold for updates you are strongly confident about? And maybe an easy way to exempt certain contacts from auto updates (family members, for example).

    Your target audience here is people like Dan and I- people who have thousands of contacts they are trying to manage, and don't have time to sort through them all. We need this automation.

    Just my $0.02, aside from this issue- you have a fantastic and unique app!

    George

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