A contact is a person the business deals with: a lead, a customer, a patient. A company is an organization; a contact belongs to at most one.
A contact
Each contact has a name, emails, phones, an address, a company, an owner (the team member responsible), followers, a type, a time zone, Additional information, tags, custom fields, its opportunities and tasks, notes, files and its Activity history. It also records whether the person agreed to marketing emails and texts.
- Emails and phones: up to 10 of each, each with a label (Mobile, Work, Home, Other, or your own word). One of each is the primary: it's the contact's main email or phone in lists, exports, emails and texts.
- Type: Lead, Customer, Partner or Other by default. An owner or manager changes the list in the business's Settings.
- Additional information: a long text box (up to 10,000 characters) for anything worth knowing about the person. A website form's message box fills it when it's empty (see Website forms). It's searchable, exported, and an import's Notes / Message / Comments column goes into it.
- Time zone: leave it empty to use the business's time zone, or set the person's own (for someone in another state).
Do not contact
Do not contact blocks a channel for this person: All, Email, Texts, Calls, WhatsApp, Incoming calls or Incoming texts. Each block records who set it, when and how, and shows in the Activity history. Messages and automations (coming later) respect it. The contact list filters by it (for example "Email blocked"), and when two contacts are merged a block on either one is kept.
Followers
Add team members as followers of a contact. A follower sees the contact even if they only see contacts assigned to them, and gets a notification when they're added and when the contact sends a new form. Bulk Follow adds a team member to many contacts at once.
Where they came from
Where they came from shows the contact's first touch and, when there's a newer one, the latest: the source (website form, import, webhook, prospect tool, typed in), the medium, UTM tags, the page they landed on, and the form. Webhooks pass utm_source, utm_medium and the other UTM values through. Filter by first source; the export includes it.
On a phone, the contact opens with big Call, Text and Email buttons, then quick Add note, then the Activity history. Email opens the email in the business app (sent as the business, with your signature, into the contact's conversation) when email works in the business; otherwise it opens the computer's or phone's own mail app. Text and Call go through the business's number once it has one.
Notes
Notes are on the contact page (and in the phone app): newest first, pinned ones on top, with who wrote them and when. Add note takes as many lines as you need. You can edit or delete your own notes; owners, managers and the agency can change anyone's (other people's notes show without Edit / Delete). Adding, editing and deleting a note all show on the contact's Activity history. Notes don't support @mentions — to get a teammate's attention, use a comment in the conversation.
With the usual duplicate rule, an email or phone number belongs to one contact only: adding a contact with an email that's already someone else's says so and links to that contact. See Activity history, duplicates and merging for the other rules.
Editing at the same time
If two people (or your phone and your computer) edit the same contact at once, the second save says This contact changed since you opened it. Reload to see the latest, then make your change again. Nothing is silently overwritten.
Search
The search box finds contacts by name, email, phone (any part of the number), Additional information and the values of their custom fields, such as a policy number.
Filters and smart lists
Filter by tags (has any of, has all of up to 5, has none of, or no tags at all), type, first source, do not contact, owner (me, nobody, a person), source, company, when they were added, their last activity, whether they have an email or phone, email permission, and any custom field (see Custom fields for the comparisons each type offers).
Save as smart list keeps the filters under a name. Owners and managers can share a smart list with the whole business; everyone else saves smart lists just for themselves. Each smart list shows who made it. Smart lists will also be the audiences for automations.
Act on many contacts
Tick contacts (up to 500 at a time) to add tags, remove tags, assign them to a team member, follow them, add them to a company, or delete them.
Export
Export downloads a CSV of the contacts that match the current filters (up to 50,000): name, email, phone, company, owner, type, source, first source, Additional information, tags, email permission, do-not-contact blocks, time zone, the date added and every custom field. Owners and managers can take export away from a person.
Deleting and restoring
Deleted contacts go to Deleted contacts, where you can restore them. A person who was deleted and then fills in a form again is restored automatically, with the new details.
Companies
Companies have a name, website, phone, address, an owner and their own custom fields. The company page lists its contacts, notes and files. Deleting a company keeps its contacts; they just have no company.
Contacts without an email or phone
A website form sent with no email or phone isn't turned into an empty contact. It waits under Unmatched form entries, where you can add the email or phone to make a contact from it, or dismiss it.