Contact Names and Emails Discrepancy

When working with Shovels data, you may notice that contact names and email addresses don't always align perfectly. This is because our system captures data differently for these two fields. Contact names are specific to individual permits and represent the name provided on that particular permit application. However, primary_email addresses are determined by analyzing frequency across all permits for a given contractor. For example, if John Smith is listed as the contact on a specific permit, but jane.doe@company.com appears most frequently across all of that contractor's permits, the primary_email field will show Jane's email rather than John's. This approach ensures you have the most actively used contact point for the company, which increases the likelihood of successful communication. For customers needing person-specific email matching, we recommend using our advanced contractor profiles which provide more granular employee contact information when available.