Contact List Inconsistencies

Tara Messa

We have a solution built for promotion workflows but are running into an issue with Contact List type cells. Right now, promotions requests are submitted by using a form. The employee recommended for promotion is selected using a contact list field type in the form. There are several approvals that happen as part of the workflow and each approver is also a contact field. We want to alter either our automations or assigned ball in court to skip steps where the employee being promoted is the same as that approval stage. Our challenge is that sometimes contacts come in as full e-mail addresses and sometimes it shows just their name. I tested out matching those two and they do not match even though they are really the same contact in the background.

Contact List Differences.gif

jmyzk_cloudsmart_jp

Hi @Tara Messa

The issue arises because Smartsheet Contact List cells sometimes display only names and sometimes email addresses, causing inconsistencies when matching contacts. This affects automation workflows and approval steps, especially when the promoted employee is the same as the approver at a specific stage.

The most reliable approach to resolving this issue is to use email addresses as the primary identifier. They are unique and ensure consistent matching in workflows.

If users remember names but not email addresses, a mapping table can be created in Smartsheet to link names to their corresponding email addresses. Formulas like VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH can convert names into email addresses internally. This ensures workflows and automations can operate accurately based on an email-based contact list.

Alternatively, the form can be updated to display options like “Name (Email)” for each candidate. This allows users to recognize and select the correct contact while ensuring email addresses are used in the background for workflow consistency. (Without the table, use the TEXT function to get the Email part.)

In both cases, once you have the candidate employee's email address, you can use a formula to reference it in the sponsor email table to get the sponsor email.

To handle the specific case of skipping approval steps where the candidate employee is the same as the approver or sponsor, automation rules can be updated to compare the email addresses of the employee and the sponsor.