Contacts and organizations
Atender’s CRM has two record types:
- Contacts — individuals. A person with a name, emails, phones, custom fields, attachments
- Organizations — companies and agencies. Have a name and a domain, and member contacts can belong to them
A single CRM list shows both, filterable by type. Both support full search, custom fields, and conversation history.
Contacts
A contact represents one person. Each contact has:
- Name — First and last name (or a single display name)
- Initials — Auto-derived from the name; used in the avatar
- Domain — Auto-derived from email, used for organization auto-linking
- Emails — Multiple email addresses supported, with one marked primary
- Phones — Multiple phone numbers supported, with one marked primary
- Other channel addresses — WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Amazon, web-chat visitor IDs
- Customer tier — VIP / Gold / Silver / custom — see customer tiers
- Custom fields — Tenant-defined fields stored as JSON — text, number, date, select, etc.
- Linked organization — Optional reference to the company this contact belongs to
Multiple emails and phones are supported through a separate addresses table — not a single field. Each address has a type (email, phone, etc.) and a primary flag per type.
Organizations
An organization represents a company, agency, or other entity that contains multiple contacts. Each organization has:
- Name — The company name
- Domain — Used to auto-link new contacts whose email domain matches
- Custom fields — Same field types as contacts — text, number, date, select, etc.
- Member contacts — All contacts linked to this organization
Open an organization to see its members in a Contacts tab — a list of up to 200 individuals linked to the company.
How linking works
A contact can belong to one organization. There are two ways to establish the link:
Auto-link by email domain
When a new individual contact is created and their email domain matches an existing organization’s domain, Atender auto-links them. Silent — no prompt, just done.
For example: an organization “Acme” has domain acme.com. A new email arrives from john@acme.com. The contact is created and linked to Acme automatically.
Manual link
You can manually link any contact to any organization, regardless of email domain. Useful for:
- Linking a contact whose personal email doesn’t share the company domain
- Re-linking after a company name change
- Retroactively organizing contacts that came in before the organization existed
See Link a contact to an organization.
What you get from linking
Linking a contact to an organization gives you:
- Aggregated history — see every conversation across every member of the org
- Org-level custom fields — capture data that applies to the company, not the individual (account tier, contract value, account manager)
- Filtering and analytics — break down conversation volume, response time, CSAT by organization
- Visual context — agents see “John Smith from Acme” rather than just “John Smith”
Contact detail tabs
Open a contact and you see its name, with a short line under it showing the customer tier (when tiers are enabled), the number of conversations, the last contact and the “customer since” date. Below that are tabs, and the contact opens on Overview:
- Overview — The contact’s note card (the first card), then Recent conversations (the last three, with the conversation summary and a View all button that opens the Conversations tab) next to a Details column: tier, emails, phones (with send email, send SMS and call actions), organization (or domain for an organization) and custom fields
- Conversations — An on-demand AI summary plus every prior conversation with this contact, most recently active first
- Attachments — Files uploaded to this contact (contracts, invoices, screenshots)
The conversation summary covers recent conversations across supported channels. The agent can translate it or regenerate it on demand.
Admins can also configure additional custom-field tabs. These tabs appear alongside the built-in tabs for the relevant contact or organization type. Opening a custom-field tab shows the fields assigned to that tab, while Overview continues to show the relevant default layout.
On iOS, contact details currently use a mobile-specific CRM view instead of the desktop contact record layout. The screen shows the available contact information and conversation history together. Users with edit permission can edit a contact’s phone numbers from Edit phones next to Contact methods, using a country picker. Numbers you add or change are saved in international format. Other contact edits (names, emails, and custom fields) are not yet available on iOS, and neither are attachments, custom-field tabs, or AI summaries.
Organizations have an additional Contacts tab listing up to 200 individuals linked to the company. They can also have organization-specific custom-field layouts, rather than reusing the individual contact layout.
Contact note
Each contact has one note. Agents edit it in place, either from the Note row at the top of the contact card in Conversation Information or from the first card on the CRM Overview.
- History — the history button opens earlier versions of the note. Choose Restore on a version to bring it back.
- Save conflicts — if someone else saved the note while you were editing, Atender tells you someone saved first and lets you choose how to resolve it.
- Note mark in the list — contacts that have a note show a note mark in the CRM list. Hover over it to read the start of the note.
- Sidekick address suggestions — when a customer’s message in the conversation gives a different address from the one in the note, Sidekick suggests updating the note. Nothing changes until a person confirms the suggestion.
For conversation-specific information, use internal comments on the conversation. For structured data, use custom fields.
The public API exposes the note as a note field on the contact.
Search across both types
The CRM search bar searches name, email, phone, and other channel addresses across both contacts and organizations. Filter by type to narrow to only contacts or only organizations. See Search the CRM (when shipped) or just use the Filter contacts menu above the list.