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Contacts and Companies

One record per person, shared by every service. A form submission, a chat, a quote and an invoice all point at the same contact instead of four half-copies.

Overview

Contacts is not a service you install - it is part of the platform, and every service writes to it. That means:

Getting contacts in

Most contacts arrive on their own. A form submission, a newsletter signup, a booking, a chat that leaves an email - each creates or matches a contact. Matching is on the email address, lowercased, so Ada@Example.com and ada@example.com are the same person.

You can also add one by hand with New contact.

Import a spreadsheet

Choose Import and upload a CSV. We read the header row and match the columns for you - Email, Full name, Phone, Company and so on - and show you what matched before anything is saved.

Rows that match an existing contact update it rather than making a second copy. Rows without a usable email or phone are reported back to you rather than silently dropped.

Your own fields

Every business tracks something the next one does not. Add your own fields under Custom fields - text, number, date, a dropdown of your choosing - and they appear on every contact.

Custom fields can be used as merge values in a campaign, so a field called renewal_month can be dropped straight into an email.

Tags and stages

A tag is a free label - "attended webinar", "VIP", "wants a callback". Use them for anything you want to filter or send to later.

A lifecycle stage is where they are with you overall: a lead, a customer, and so on. One stage per contact, unlike tags.

Both are visible to automation: a workflow can start when a tag is added or when a stage changes, which is how you get "tag someone VIP and they automatically get the VIP welcome".

Two separate things, and the difference matters:

Both are enforced everywhere, not just in Outreach. If someone replies STOP to a text, the do-not-contact flag is set on their contact record automatically, so a payment request or a campaign from a different part of the product will not reach them either.

That is deliberate: consent belongs to the person, not to the service that happened to collect it.

The activity timeline

Open a contact to see everything that has happened with them in order - form submissions, messages sent and received, appointments, quotes, deals, chats. It reads across services, which is the point.

Saved lists

Build a filter - a tag, a stage, whether they have a phone number - and save it. The list stays live: contacts join and leave it as they change, so "everyone tagged VIP with an email address" is always current.

Saved lists are what you point a campaign at, so you are not rebuilding the same filter every time you send.

Merging duplicates

Duplicates happen - somebody signs up with a work address and later a personal one. Select two contacts and choose Merge.

You pick which record survives. Everything attached to the other one - submissions, messages, deals, timeline - moves across rather than being deleted, so nothing is lost in the merge.

Companies

If you sell to organisations rather than individuals, add the company and link the people at it. A company record shows who works there and what is in play with them.

Deals and quotes can point at the company as well as the person, so when your contact leaves their job the history stays with the organisation.

Export and erasure

Export any list to CSV from the Contacts page.

If someone asks to be removed under GDPR, deleting the contact removes their record and the personal data attached to it. Contacts are covered by the same data-subject export and erasure process as the rest of your workspace - see Account & Team.