Contacts
Under Customers → Contacts you manage everyone who calls or messages your business. The assistant uses this data to recognise known callers and address them personally. This article covers the available fields, how recognition and blocking work, and how to import and export contacts.
The list and the search box cover the 500 newest contacts. You can search by name, phone number, email address or company.
A Viewer can view, search and export contacts. Adding, importing, changing, calling and deleting take an Editor or Admin.
Fields
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Phone | Pick the country, then type the number as you dial it at home. A leading 0 is removed. The contact is stored in international format (E.164, e.g. +447700900123). This number is how the assistant recognises the contact. You can leave it empty, but then there is no recognition, no timeline and no Call button. A number that already exists is not refused: add it by hand again and you have two contacts. |
| For finding the contact. It is also in the export. The assistant does not receive it. | |
| First name | Used for the personal greeting. |
| Last name | |
| Company | Useful for business clients and property managers with several sites. The assistant receives it. |
| Notes | Free text the assistant receives as background, e.g. "Has a service plan, Worcester boiler 2021, key with neighbour". |
| Tags | Your own labels, such as service-plan or landlord. They appear on the contact page and in the export. You cannot search or filter on them, and the assistant does not receive them. |
| Custom fields | Fields from a CSV import or the API, e.g. "Customer number" or "Boiler model". You see them on the contact page, but cannot change them there. The assistant does not receive them. |
Add a contact
Go to Customers → Contacts and click Add contact. A panel opens on the right, so the list stays visible. Fill in the details and click Save.
Automatic recognition
When a number that is already a contact calls, or writes by SMS or WhatsApp, the assistant receives that contact's name, company and notes as context in the prompt, with the instruction to greet the person by name and check it is speaking to the right person. It therefore knows who it is talking to and can act accordingly, for example by not asking for the address again if it is in the notes, or by knowing a service plan is in place. This recognition does not work in webchat.
You can also use the name in the greeting with the variable {{contact.name}} (first and last name) or {{name}} (first name only). On the assistant's Voice & greeting tab, {{contact.name}} shows as [Customer name]. An example greeting:
Good afternoon {{contact.name}}, welcome to De Vries Plumbing. How can I help you?Empty values
If the caller is unknown, {{contact.name}} is empty and the caller hears "Good afternoon , welcome to…". So only use the variable in the greeting of an assistant that almost exclusively speaks to known customers. The variable does not work in the assistant's instructions: it stays empty there. You do not need it there either, because the assistant already receives the name of a known caller and uses it by itself.
When a number that has been in touch before calls or writes, even without a contact, the assistant also gets a short note about the last three conversations from the past 90 days, or less if your retention period is shorter. The note holds the subject, when and through which channel it was, and whether something was still open then. On the phone the assistant also gets the first name; a name you did not enter or import yourself it asks about first. A number does not prove who is calling, so the assistant does not bring this up by itself. Sensitive subjects are not remembered. Webchat is not part of this. If you delete a contact or change its number, the notes on that number go too. A note without a contact expires by itself, or goes when you create a contact with that number and delete it again. You can turn this off per assistant on the Conversation rules tab, under Use earlier conversations.
Contacts are also created automatically
You don't have to enter every contact yourself. When a customer gives their name or company during a conversation, the assistant automatically creates a contact with those details and the number they called or wrote from. A number someone types into the webchat doesn't count for this: it could be someone else's. By SMS and WhatsApp this happens as soon as the assistant saves a request with a name or the conversation ends: the assistant closes it, you click End conversation, or 6 hours pass without a message (with your team: not while the customer waits for an answer, after that 18 quiet hours). While the conversation is still open, no contact is created otherwise. If the same person calls again later, they are recognised.
Anonymous callers (withheld number) are not saved, because there is no number to attach the contact to. Calls from a landline do not create a contact either; you can still add that number by hand or with a CSV import, and a contact that already exists is still recognised.
Once you have edited a contact on the contact page or brought it in with a CSV import, later conversations no longer change its name and company, even if they are empty. For all other contacts, later conversations only fill fields that are still empty.
Blocking
Getting spam, robocalls or a person you no longer wish to speak to? Block the contact.
- Go to Customers → Contacts and open the contact.
- Turn on Blocked. It saves straight away.
A blocked contact gets the status Blocked. When this number calls, the call is rejected: the assistant does not answer, the caller gets a busy signal and no conversation appears in the Inbox. SMS and WhatsApp messages from the number are ignored: they get no reply and do not become a conversation. Blocking only applies to calls and messages coming in from this number. Webchat and outbound calls, also in a campaign, still go ahead. You lift the block by turning Blocked off again on the contact page.
Next to Blocked is Always allow: that number is never limited as a repeat caller, and we never ask whether to block it. A contact is never both; turning one on turns the other off. You can also block or always allow a number from a conversation. See Caller protection.
Import contacts via CSV
Already have a customer list in another system? Import it in one go.
- Export your contacts from the other system as a CSV file. Save it as UTF-8; either a comma or a semicolon is fine as the separator.
- Go to Customers → Contacts and click Import. A panel opens on the right.
- Paste the content or choose the file. The columns
phone,name,email,companyandnotesare recognised automatically, as are variants such asphone_number,telefoon,mobile,naam,bedrijfandnotities. Capitals, spaces,_and-make no difference. Other columns are saved as custom fields, up to 200 per contact. Tags and blocks cannot be imported: the columnstagsandblockedalso become custom fields. - Click Import. You see how many contacts were imported and how many rows were skipped. More than 5,000 rows are processed in the background; keep the panel open until the result appears.
A few rules that apply during import:
- Phone numbers are normalised to E.164. A number with a single leading 0 is always read as a Dutch number, even if your business is in another country:
06 12345678becomes+31612345678. For other countries use the country code, for example+44 7700 900123or0044 7700 900123. - Some rows are skipped. A row with no usable phone number and no email address is not imported. If the number is unusable but there is an email address, you get a contact without a number.
- A number that already exists as a contact is updated, not duplicated. The fields from the CSV replace those in that contact. If the same number appears more than once in your file, you can still end up with duplicate contacts, so remove duplicate rows first. A row without a number always becomes a new contact, even with a known email address.
- Empty cells and missing columns wipe data. On an existing contact, the email address, name, company, notes and custom fields are replaced by what is in the file, even if that is empty or the column is missing. Tags and Blocked stay as they are. So put everything you want to keep in your file.
- File size and row limits. You can import up to 100,000 rows and 25 MB per file. Pasted text can be at most 5,000,000 characters. A larger file or too many rows shows a clear error with those limits so you can split the CSV and try again. Once you reach 1,000,000 contacts in total, new rows are skipped. Per row we keep up to 50 extra columns and 20,000 characters in those columns together; the rest of that row's extra columns is left out.
Splitting names
If the full name sits in a single name column, we split it at the first space: the first word becomes the first name, the rest the last name. So Jan de Vries becomes Jan and de Vries. If your file has separate columns, name them firstName or voornaam and lastName, achternaam or surname; they take priority over the name column.
Export contacts via CSV
- Go to Customers → Contacts.
- Click Export. You get all your contacts, up to the newest 5,000, also right after a search.
The file has the columns phone, email, firstName, lastName, company, notes, tags (separated by |) and blocked, without the custom fields, so you can use it as a list for a campaign (see Outbound calls) or to update your accounts system. Remove blocked contacts yourself first, because a campaign calls every number in the list.
The contact page
Click a contact to see everything in one place:
- Details, editable inline and saved automatically as soon as you leave a field, with the custom fields from an import or the API below them.
- Timeline with the last 50 conversations with this phone number across all channels (phone, SMS and WhatsApp), with the summary and outcome per conversation and links to the conversation, the request and the appointment. Conversations you archived with Archive are not included. See Inbox & analytics.
- Call: let the assistant call this contact now. Choose Call from number and, if that number has no fixed assistant, Assistant, then click Call now. You need a plan with outbound calling and a number marked Incoming + outgoing under Settings → Phone numbers. The assistant only receives the full name here, in
{{name}}(first and last name, so unlike on an incoming call), not the company or the notes.{{contact.name}}stays empty.
Delete on the contact page removes a contact. Its name and the link to the contact are then removed from the related conversations. The conversations themselves stay, with phone number, transcript and summary, and requests and appointments stay as well. Those conversations are only deleted after the retention period. As an Admin you set that period under Settings → Business, on the Privacy & safety card, at Keep conversations (days); see Technical settings.