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 every individual 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 tabs:
- Overview — Name, contact methods, tier badge, custom fields, quick actions
- Conversations — Every prior conversation with this contact in chronological order
- Attachments — Files uploaded to this contact (contracts, invoices, screenshots)
Organizations have an additional Contacts tab listing every individual linked to the company.
What contacts don’t have (today)
The vault docs sometimes describe a sticky-note “Notes” feature on contact records. That feature is not currently implemented in the UI. Notes that you might want to attach to a contact today belong on the conversation as internal comments, or in custom fields if they’re structured.
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 chips above the list.