Contacts

Contacts are the people behind your conversations. AlphOne keeps one contact per person, no matter how many channels they reach you on, and the Contacts entry in the menu is where you manage them.

Where contacts come from

Most contacts create themselves. The first time someone messages your WhatsApp number, AlphOne creates a contact named after their WhatsApp profile name and links their phone number to it as an identity.

When a person hides their profile name, the contact is named after the raw phone number instead. Those number-named contacts are expected, and fixing them is the point of the next section.

You can also add a contact by hand with the New contact button, for people you want in the CRM before they ever message you.

The contact list

The list shows one row per contact: its initials, its name with its first identity under it, a badge for every channel it can be reached on, and the date it was created. Click a name to open the contact. On a phone the rows stack instead, and a tap on a row opens it.

The list opens with the newest contacts first. To sort another way, open the menu on the Name or Created column heading and pick an order, or choose Sort by under the gear button.

The list shows one page at a time. Move between pages at the bottom of the list, and choose how many contacts a page holds under the gear button. The search, the filters, the sort and the page stay in the address, so the browser’s Back button brings you back to the same place.

Renaming

Open the actions menu at the end of a contact’s row and choose Rename. Type the new name and press Rename. You can also open the contact and edit the name field there. The new name applies everywhere immediately, including past conversations in the WhatsApp inbox, because conversations reference the contact rather than copying its name.

Renaming is how you clean up number-named contacts: search for the number, then rename the contact to the person’s real name.

Adding a task

The same actions menu offers Add task. It opens the New task form with the contact already linked, so the task shows on the contact’s page once you create it.

Searching and filtering

The search box on the contact list matches three things:

• the contact’s name, by any part of it, ignoring case
• the profile name a channel reported for them
• their phone number, by any fragment, regardless of how you type it: searching +34 612 34 finds a number stored as 34612…

The filter button beside the search box narrows the list to the contacts reached on the channels you pick, such as Email or WhatsApp.

Identities

A contact’s detail page lists its identities: the per-channel handles that link conversations to the contact, such as a WhatsApp phone number. Identities are created automatically by channels and cannot be edited.

Each line shows the channel and then the handle, such as Email: maria@example.com. To remove an identity, click the trash icon at the end of its line.

The contact page

A contact’s page has two columns. The left one holds the name, the identities and the tasks, which is where the work happens. The right one holds the date the contact was created and the custom fields. On a narrow screen the right column moves under the tasks.

Storing more about a contact

A contact holds only a name and its identities out of the box. To store an address, a birth date, or anything else your business needs, create your own fields. See Fields.

Deleting

Contacts cannot be deleted yet. A contact anchors its whole conversation history, so deletion needs more care than a button. It is planned deliberately rather than omitted.