Contact Records
Selecting a contact on the All Contacts page opens its record, which holds the identifiers that address the person and the values stored against every contact field.
The Contact Detail Page
The record has two tabs. Reserved Fields shows the fields that exist for every contact, arranged in four groups:
| Group | Fields |
|---|---|
| General | First Name, Last Name |
| Identifier | Email, Phone Number, External ID |
| Address | Address Line 1, Address Line 2, City, State/Province/Region, Postal Code, Country |
| Additional | Alternate Email, Alternate Phone, Unique Name |
Those are the readable names, the form this page uses. The same fields are offered under a raw name in a template's variable picker and in the dropdowns that map a file's columns, so the field shown here as Phone Number appears there as phoneNumber. Reserved Fields gives both names for every field, alongside what each one holds.
Custom Fields shows the fields your organisation has added and this contact's value for each. Custom fields are defined once for the whole organisation, not per contact. See Custom Fields.
Editing a record is covered in Managing Contacts.
Identifiers
A contact is addressed by up to three identifiers, which rank in this order:
- Phone Number
- External ID
At least one is required, and a contact can hold any combination of the three.
Uniqueness
Where a contact holds more than one identifier, only one of them has to be unique within the organisation. The others can be shared with other contacts. A parent and a child can share an email address while each holds their own phone number, and they remain two separate contacts because the phone numbers tell them apart.
A phone number used as an identifier has to be in E.164 format, described in E.164 Phone Number Format. An External ID carries the identifier a contact already has in another system, so a record here can be tied back to the record it came from.
How Identifiers Are Displayed
Wherever a contact is shown as a single value, such as the Identifier column on the All Contacts page, the highest priority identifier present is used. A contact with an email address and a phone number is shown by the email address. A contact with only an External ID is shown by that.
How Identifiers Are Matched
Matching runs per type. An email address is only ever compared with an email address, a phone number with a phone number, and an External ID with an External ID. A phone number and an External ID holding the same digits are not treated as the same identifier.
This is what decides whether a new contact can be created and whether an uploaded row updates an existing contact. See Adding a Contact Manually and Uploading Contacts.
An identifier cannot be changed once the contact exists, and an identifier left blank at creation cannot be filled in later. A contact created with an email address only keeps that email address as its sole identifier. To address the same person by a different identifier, create a second contact.
Every other field on the record stays editable.