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The contacts behind your inbox

How the social CRM builds itself from recorded inbox activity, what you can add to a contact, and the things it deliberately does not do.

Updated

The CRM is a list of the people who have engaged this workspace. You do not create a contact; a contact appears the first time an item arrives from a handle, and its interaction count rises every time another one does.

A contact is identified by workspace, platform and handle together. The same person on Instagram and on Facebook is two contacts, on purpose, because nothing in this product can prove they are the same person.

What you add is your own knowledge: tags and notes. Everything else is a record of what happened.

BEFORE YOU START

  • Access to the workspace to read contacts.
  • The "edit" permission to change tags and notes. Without it the fields are read only and the page says why.
  • Recorded inbox activity. Contacts are a by-product of it, so a workspace with no recorded items has no contacts.

STEPS

  1. Open CRM for the workspace, or go to /app/workspaces/{workspace}/crm.
  2. Read the table: handle, name, platform, tags and how many interactions have been recorded.
  3. Click a handle to open the contact.
  4. Edit "Tags (comma separated)" and "Notes", and choose Save.
  5. Read the interaction history underneath. Every entry is a real inbox item with its kind, status and time.

WHAT YOU SHOULD SEE

"Saved." on the contact, and the interaction history listing the items that produced this contact.

WHAT THIS WILL NOT DO

  • It will not let you create a contact by hand. There is no create form and no endpoint.
  • It will not let you delete or merge contacts. Two handles for one person stay two contacts.
  • It will not import or export. There is no upload and no download.
  • It will not hold an email address, a phone number, a company, a deal or a pipeline stage. This is a record of engagement, not a sales CRM.
  • It will not let you change a contact's name. The name is taken the first time it is seen and then left alone.
  • It will not message anyone. Nothing in this product sends a message to a contact.
  • It will not show the detail panel on your phone. The mobile screen is a list only, with no tags, notes or history.

WORTH KNOWING

Contacts are only as complete as the inbox is, and the inbox collects nothing on its own. In practice a workspace whose integration does not record activity will have an empty CRM, and that is the accurate state rather than a fault.

IF IT DOES NOT WORK

  • "Your role does not include editing contacts, so tags and notes are read-only here. An administrator can change that." means you lack the edit permission.
  • "edit permission required." is the same refusal from the API.
  • "This contact could not be loaded." and "Changes could not be saved." are the two failures the detail panel distinguishes.
  • "No contacts yet" means nothing has been recorded against this workspace.
  • "No recorded interactions yet." on a contact means the items that created it have since been removed.

COMMON QUESTIONS

Can I search contacts?

The API accepts a search over handle and name. The page does not offer a search box.

Why does an item without a handle create no contact?

Because a handle is the identity. An item with none is still filed in the inbox; it just has no person to attach to.

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