Contacts

People and companies in CRM. A conversation is not a contact

Contacts#

CRM stores people and the work you track with them. Open CRM in the agent sidebar. You land on Customers.

A contact is a person, or a company linked to people. A conversation in Activity is only the message thread. One person can have many conversations. A conversation without a name, email, or phone is not yet a person. Service senders, such as an automated mailbox, can be kept for history and are not the same as named people.

There is no lead score on the customer list. Do not treat message count or sentiment as a score. The Status column uses the lifecycle labels configured for this agent.

Where to go#

Place	What it is
Customers → People	Named people, service senders, or all contact records
Customers → Companies	Companies linked to people
Lifecycle	The stages you use to classify people. Open stages are still in motion. Closed stages are finished
Open Work	Outcomes and next steps. The button is on Customers
Today	Due and overdue work. Analytics can open it from Action Needed

The labels in the CRM menu are your lifecycle. Edit the names in Lifecycle. They are not a fixed sales pipeline, and they are not the status of a conversation.

Contact actions#

Action	How
Find someone	Search name, email, phone, or company. Filter record type, branch, owner, status, source, or channel
Add a person	Add person
Bring people in	Import, a connected conversation, or a lead form
Download the current list	Export. The file is CSV for the people that match the filters
Open the profile	Select the person. Edit name, email, phone, company, owner, and tags there
Read the thread	Conversations on the profile, or Activity for the live inbox
Record offline work	Log activity: note, call, meeting, or email. Linking a chat is optional
Merge duplicates	Merge on the profile
Remove a person	Delete on the profile
See open work	The operations column, or Open Work

Named people is the usual view. Switch record type only when you need service senders or every contact record. Companies stay on the Companies tab. An exact company name links to that company. Different businesses are not merged because the names look similar.

Purchases, bookings, consent, and custom attributes appear on the profile when that information exists.

Work and next steps#

Work is an outcome: a booking, order, case, or other item the business actually uses. The shared states are Open, Waiting, Completed, and Cancelled. More specific stages appear only for work types you use. A conversation does not have to be attached. A job agreed outside chat can still be tracked.

A next step says who owes what, and by when. Logging it in CRM does not send the reminder. Message timing and cancellation belong to Agent Studio → Workflows.

Today lists overdue work, work due now, items waiting on a customer or someone else, and recent changes. A suggestion still needs Apply or Dismiss. It does not become work because it sounds plausible.

Leads#

A submitted lead form saves a person. Opening a chat does not. Enable Collect Lead in Agent Studio → Tools. The Lead capture card on Deploy → Chat widget or Chat bar → Content only opens that tool. It does not turn the form on. See Lead capture.