Every ticket belongs to a contact, the person who raised it. Contacts can belong to a company. Together they give you the full history of a customer in one place: before you reply, you can see what else they've asked, what's still open and what the team is working on for them.
You'll find both under Customers in the sidebar.
Where contacts come from
You rarely need to add contacts by hand. IntelliDesk creates them for you:
- Email. When someone emails one of your help desks for the first time, they become a contact.
- Portal, widget and live chat. The same happens when someone submits a ticket through your customer portal or the widget on your website, or starts a chat.
- By hand. Use Add contact on the Contacts page for someone who hasn't been in touch yet.
Companies are linked by email domain
When a new contact emails from a business address, like werner@ironwood-auto.example, IntelliDesk looks for a company with the domain ironwood-auto.example. If there's one, the contact joins it. If there isn't, a company is created for that domain.
Personal addresses (Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and the like) are never turned into companies, because they'd lump unrelated people together. You can still link such a contact to a company by hand.
Each domain belongs to one company. If you try to give a second company a domain that's already taken, IntelliDesk will tell you which company has it.
The Contacts list
The list shows each contact's company, how many open and total tickets they have, and when they were last seen (the last time they emailed you, replied, or raised or answered a ticket in the portal).
- Search by name, email or company.
- Has open tickets shows only customers who are waiting on you.
- No company finds contacts who aren't linked to a company yet, which is useful for tidying up.
- Sort by any column. Open the ⋯ menu to Export CSV of the contacts you're looking at.
A contact's page
Click a contact to open their page. The header shows their email, their company and how many tickets are open.
- Tickets: every ticket they've raised. Filter by status (including Customer responded, meaning they've replied and are waiting on you), by priority or by type, or search. Switch to Timeline to see their tickets as a history, grouped by day.
- Cards: project cards linked to this person.
- Details: email, phone, company and any custom fields your admin has set up for contacts.
- Activity: what's changed on this contact and their tickets, and who changed it.
Editing a contact
Click Edit at the top right to change a contact's name, email, phone or company, or pick No company to unlink them.
The Allow change-request submissions switch controls whether this person sees a Submit a change request option in the customer portal alongside ordinary tickets. Turn it on for the people at a client who are allowed to ask for changes.
Two contacts can't share an email address. If you try to give a contact an address that another contact already uses, IntelliDesk tells you who has it. That usually means it's the same person twice, so merge them instead.
Merging duplicate contacts
The same person sometimes ends up as two contacts, for example when they write from both a work and a personal address. To combine them:
- On the Contacts page, open the ⋯ menu and choose Merge contacts.
- Pick the primary contact (the one to keep) and the secondary one.
- Click Merge.
The secondary contact's tickets, project cards and survey results move to the primary. Anything the primary is missing, such as a company, phone number or custom field value, is filled in from the secondary. The secondary contact is then deleted.
Companies
The Companies list shows each company's domain, how many contacts it has, and its open and total tickets. Use Add company to create one, and Export CSV to download the list.
A company's page brings its people together:
- Tickets: every ticket from anyone at the company. Use the All contacts menu to narrow it to one person.
- Contacts: everyone linked to the company.
- Cards: project cards for this company.
- Details: the name, domain and company custom fields.
- Activity: the history of changes.
- Documents: files and notes about the client, such as contracts, SLAs and onboarding notes, kept where the whole team can find them.
Click Edit to rename a company or change its domain. You can paste a website address or an email address; IntelliDesk keeps just the domain. Changing the domain affects new contacts only. People already linked stay linked.
Deleting
Only managers can delete contacts and companies.
- A contact can only be deleted once all of their tickets are closed. Their closed tickets are kept, but they'll no longer be linked to anyone. If the contact is a duplicate, merge it instead, so its history is kept.
- A company: its contacts and tickets are kept and simply unlinked from it.
Tips
- Glance at the contact's open tickets before replying. They may have asked the same thing twice, or be chasing something a teammate is handling.
- Use custom fields (Settings → Custom Fields) for the details your team keeps asking for, like an account number or a contract tier.
- Filter the Contacts list by No company every so often and link people up, so company views stay complete.
Related: Tags, priorities, and ticket types