Follow Up Boss: relationships come across, including for accounts already connected

The spouses, partners and referral partners a team spent years linking in
Follow Up Boss used to stop at the border: the integration imported the
contacts and dropped every relationship between them. They now come across
with their type.

What you may notice

• Connecting Follow Up Boss brings each contact’s relationships over. The
  related person is found if they are already in your account and created if
  they are not, and the two records are linked with the type from Follow Up
  Boss.
• Relationships added or changed in Follow Up Boss after that arrive on the
  next sync, the same as any other change to a contact.
• Type is matched without regard to capitalisation, so spouse, Spouse
  and SPOUSE all arrive as Spouse. A type Sure Send cannot link — Fiancée,
  say — is imported as Other rather than dropping the relationship.
• These are the same rules the CSV importer’s relationship columns follow, so
  a team that migrated by file and a team that connected the integration end
  up with the same links.

Accounts that connected months ago

Relationships can be filled in for a team that connected before this shipped,
from data already on our side — no re-import and no re-sync from Follow Up
Boss is needed. Ask support to run it for your account.

Contacts already in your account are never rewritten

A relationship describes someone else; it is not an edit to a contact it
happens to match. A contact matched for a relationship keeps everything it
already had.

One case gets special care, the same one the CSV importer handles. If a
relationship’s email address is stored as a secondary address on some other
contact — a spouse’s address kept on their partner’s record, which is common —
matching on it would attach the relationship to the wrong person. When the name
from Follow Up Boss does not agree with that contact, a separate contact is
created and linked instead.

What this doesn’t change

Nothing is duplicated by a later sync: a relationship that already exists is
left alone, including its type, so a type someone corrected by hand in Sure
Send stays corrected. Relationships are not yet sent back to Follow Up Boss —
this is the inbound direction.