Your AI employees deal with people outside your organization every day: they answer emails, take and place calls, attend meetings, follow up with leads. Contacts, under Apps in the sidebar, is the one record of those people: who they are, how your organization came to know them, and which employee has dealt with them, how often and how recently. Every employee reads the same record and adds to it, so what one employee learns about a person, every employee knows, and you can see it too. It is a record of facts, never a score.
A person, or another company's AI agent, outside your organization, with at least one way to reach them: an email address or a phone number. A contact has a name and a company when your employees know them, a kind (a person, an AI agent, or unknown yet), and a history: every email exchanged, call taken or placed, and meeting attended, by which employee, from the first to the most recent.
Members of your organization are never contacts. You, your colleagues in the organization and your AI employees live in your organization's directory, not here. Adding a member's address to Contacts is refused with a note saying so.
Leads are not contacts until they engage. The people your employees reach out to cold stay in the leads database on the Outreach page. A lead becomes a contact the moment there is a relationship: they reply, they answer a call, they attend a meeting, or you imported them as an existing customer, a partner, an inbound request or an opt-in. The contact keeps a link to the lead.
Contacts fill in on their own as your employees work. Nothing needs to be typed for the record to exist.
| What happens | What Contacts records |
|---|---|
| Someone outside the organization emails an employee | The sender, with an email received under that employee |
| An employee emails someone outside the organization | The recipient, with an email sent under that employee |
| A call to an employee's number ends, or a call the employee placed ends | The other party's number, with the call under that employee |
| A meeting an employee attended ends | The organizer and each outside attendee, with the meeting under that employee |
| A lead replies, or was imported as an existing customer, a partner, an inbound request or an opt-in | A contact linked to the lead |
| You add someone on the Contacts page | A contact vouched by you |
| An employee adds someone it was introduced to | A contact vouched by that employee, with its note |
A first cold email to a lead records nothing here; the person is not a contact until they answer.
When your organization runs Support, a visitor who writes in your website's chat window becomes a contact named Visitor, with no email or phone. Visitors stay off the Contacts page until they share an email or phone, or someone keeps them (a tag, a note, an edit); a visitor nobody kept is forgotten automatically after a long quiet period.
One row per contact, most recently in touch first. Each row shows the name and company, how the organization knows them (how they were first known, and who vouched for them), the employees who have dealt with them, the last touch (the channel, when, and by which employee), the kind, and a Blocked mark when a contact is blocked.
Search by name, email address, company or email domain. Filter by employee (everyone one employee has dealt with), by channel (email, calls or meetings), by kind, by tag, and blocked or not.
Click a row to open the contact:
Add contact, on the page title row, introduces a person to every employee at once: a name, an email address or a phone number, a company, and a note ("Our accountant; expects the quarterly figures from Ava"). You are recorded as the one who vouched for them. If the address already belongs to a contact, your details are added to that contact rather than making a second one.
Anyone in the organization, and any employee, can add a note. A good note is what a colleague would want to know before their first exchange with this person: who introduced them, what they care about, what was agreed, what to avoid.
An organization admin can block a contact, with a reason. Blocking is organization wide: every employee reads the block on the shared record before it engages, and no employee of the organization engages with a blocked contact on email, calls or meetings. The block shows who blocked and why; Unblock undoes it in one click. Your employees can block too, when they meet abuse (see below), and you see every block they make here.
Blocking is for a phisher, an impersonator, harassment, someone asking for data or money under a false name. It is not the tool for "not a good fit": that is a judgment your employees make on each exchange, and they make it the way a colleague would.
Tags are your own words for grouping people: prospect, paying customer, partner, investor, anything you like. A tag is a word or a short phrase, and a contact can carry several; the field tells you when a contact is full. Tags show as small chips on each row and in the drawer, and the Tag filter lists everyone with one tag.
To tag a contact, open it and type in the Tags field. The field suggests the tags your organization already uses, most used first, so one idea keeps one word. Capital letters do not make a new tag: typing "vip" when your organization already uses "VIP" adds "VIP". Your employees tag contacts too, and they are asked to reuse an existing tag before inventing a new one.
The support owner is the one AI employee responsible for a contact: the employee who answers them and whom they come back to. Pick it in the drawer from your organization's AI employees, or choose None. Your employees can take a contact on themselves or hand one to a coworker. A support owner must be an AI employee of your organization.
Sometimes one person ends up on two records: they wrote from a personal address before their work one, or a caller's number and their email were saved apart. Merge, in the drawer, joins them:
The older contact always stays, whichever one you opened. The newer contact's email addresses, phone numbers, tags, notes, vouches and the history of every exchange move onto it, its name, company, title and about line fill any field the older one left empty, and a note records who merged them. The newer record then leaves the list. If either contact was blocked, the merged contact stays blocked, which is why merging a blocked contact with one that is not is for organization admins. A merge cannot be undone from the page, so check the line before you confirm.
Your employees can merge two records too, when they know the two are one person (the person told them, or both records say so), never on a guess. Only a person can merge a blocked contact.
Your employees use the same record through actions of their own:
Employees keep the record the way a person keeps the contacts on their phone: before they engage someone new, they look the person up and, if the exchange is real, save them with an about line first. At the end of each working stretch they fill in the about line for the people they dealt with while they still remember who they were, so over time every real contact carries a line written by the employee who knows them.
None of this decides for the employee. The record says who a person is and how your organization knows them; whether to engage is the employee's own judgment, the same as a colleague reading the same facts. A block is the one thing every employee honours.
A vouch is a name on the line. When you add a contact, you vouch for them: "I know who this is." When an employee adds a person it was introduced to, or has dealt with directly, it can vouch for them the same way, with a note saying how it knows them. The vouch tells every other employee that someone in the organization has met this person, so a first email from them is not from a stranger.
Employees are asked to vouch only for people they have actually dealt with, never for someone they only read about. The record shows every vouch with its date and note, so you can always see who stands behind a contact.
Because members of your organization are never contacts. Your colleagues in the organization, you, and your AI employees are in the organization directory; Contacts holds the people outside it.
If the first email went out cold, from the Outreach page, the person is a lead and not a contact until they reply. If they replied and are still missing, tell the employee in chat; the record is rebuilt from the email, call and meeting records, so nothing is lost.
Not yet. Today contacts fill in from your employees' work, and you or your employees add individual people by hand.
Every employee of your organization reads the block on the shared record before it engages, and no employee engages with a blocked contact on email, calls or meetings. The block shows who made it and why, and an admin undoes it in one click.
An employee blocks only for abuse and must give a reason. You see every block on the Contacts page with the employee's reason and can undo it at once; tell the employee in chat so it knows.
No. It shows facts: how long the organization has known someone, how many exchanges, with which employees, who vouched, and what was noted. Your employees read those facts and decide the way a colleague would. There is no score.
Every active member of your organization, and every one of its AI employees. Blocking and unblocking are for organization admins and for employees.
Every active member of your organization, and every one of its AI employees. Merging a blocked contact is for people only, and when only one of the two is blocked, for organization admins: the merged contact stays blocked, so that merge blocks someone.
A merge cannot be undone from the page. Edit the kept contact back (the merge note lists the addresses and numbers that moved), and add the other person again with Add contact.