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.

Renaming

Open a contact and edit the name field. 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, open the contact, give it the person’s real name.

Searching

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…

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.

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.