Airtable Review-Form Contact and Retailer Automation

Failure mode 01 Manual matching at scale

Every review submission had to be matched to a Contact record and a Retailer record by hand. Staff had to interpret the submission, search for the customer, search for the location, and then attach the review to both. As submission volume grew, the lookup work consumed more time and attention. The matching itself was the fragile part. A submission that did not obviously correspond to an existing customer had to be assessed individually, and the process relied on whoever happened to be doing the lookup. The company had no consistent rule for what to do when a match could not be found.

Failure mode 02 Submissions at risk of being dropped

A review that could not be matched to an existing Contact or Retailer had no clear path forward. The default outcome of an unmatchable submission was that it stalled in the workflow — and a stalled submission could be lost entirely. For a feedback process meant to capture customer sentiment, losing submissions was not an acceptable outcome. The company needed a workflow that would never let a review disappear from the pipeline, regardless of whether a match existed.

Decision 01 One deterministic matching rule

Email address became the single matching key for both Contact and Retailer records. The system reads the email from each incoming submission and checks it against existing Contact and Retailer records. This removed the ambiguity of human lookup and gave every submission a consistent, repeatable outcome. The rule is simple by design. A deterministic email match either succeeds or it does not, and the system behaves accordingly. There is no fuzzy matching, no interpretation, and no judgment call that could vary between handlers.

“Match on email — the only consistent identity.”

Decision 02 A flagged fallback that preserves submissions

For submissions that do not match an existing Contact, the system creates a new Contact record with a flag indicating that it was created from an unmatched review. The submission is linked to that flagged Contact and continues through the pipeline instead of stalling or disappearing. This design guarantees that no review is ever dropped. Every submission either links to a verified record or creates a clearly identifiable placeholder that can be reviewed and resolved later. The flag makes the unresolved state visible rather than silent.

“Never drop what can't be matched — preserve it. A preserved submission can be resolved; a lost one cannot.”