Contacts
How contact records are created, matched, merged, and kept clean.
On this page
How contacts are created
You rarely create one by hand. A contact appears when:
- Someone emails your support address for the first time
- Someone chats through the widget and gives an email
- A message arrives on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger
- A connected store syncs its customers
Matching
Inbound messages are matched to an existing contact by email address, normalised to lowercase and trimmed. No match creates a new contact.
Email is a good identifier and an imperfect one. The same person may exist twice if they wrote from a work address once and a personal one another time, or if they messaged on Instagram, where Meta does not share email addresses at all.
Merging duplicates
Merge from the contact record. Ticket history, orders, and tags combine onto the surviving contact.
Merging is not reversible — check you have the right two records first. The common giveaway is identical names with different addresses, or the same phone number.
What a contact holds
| Field | Source |
|---|---|
| Name | The message header, or store data |
| The address they wrote from | |
| Phone | Store data, or added by an agent |
| Source | The channel they first arrived on |
| Tags | Added by you or by automations |
| Orders | The connected store, matched by email |
| Tickets | Every conversation they've had |
Keeping the list clean
Contacts count against your plan, and an inflated list quietly damages campaign deliverability.
- Remove hard bounces. An address that does not exist will never engage and will keep hurting your sending reputation.
- Prune long-inactive contacts before a large campaign.
- Merge duplicates when you spot them, rather than in an annual clean-up.
Editing and deleting
Edit directly on the contact record; changes apply everywhere. Deleting removes the contact and their personal data permanently — see Data and privacy.