CRMbeginner

Link a contact to an organization

Tie an individual contact to a company in the CRM. Atender auto-links by email domain when possible, but you can also link manually — useful when the contact's email doesn't match the company domain.

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Link a contact to an organization

Linking a contact to an organization tells Atender that this person belongs to that company. Once linked:

  • The organization’s Contacts tab lists this person as a member
  • Conversations from this person count toward the organization’s history
  • Org-level custom fields are visible in the contact’s context
  • Reports can roll up by organization

There are two ways to establish the link.

When a new individual contact is created and their primary email’s domain matches an existing organization’s domain, Atender links them automatically.

Example: organization “Acme” has domain acme.com. A new email arrives from john@acme.com. The newly-created contact is linked to Acme — no prompt, just done.

For this to work:

  • The organization must exist before the contact is created
  • The organization must have its domain field set
  • The contact’s primary email must be on that domain

If you want auto-linking to happen, configure organizations with their domains up front.

When auto-link doesn’t apply — the contact uses a personal email, the organization didn’t exist yet, the domain doesn’t match — link manually.

Steps

  1. Open the CRM and find the contact.
  2. In the contact detail, find the Linked organization section (in the Overview tab).
  3. Click Link to organization (or the equivalent action in your version of the UI).
  4. Search for the organization by name.
  5. Pick the organization from the dropdown.
  6. Confirm.

The link saves immediately. The organization now appears on the contact’s Overview, and the contact appears in the organization’s Contacts tab.

If you linked the wrong organization (or want to remove the link entirely):

  1. Open the contact.
  2. Open the Linked organization section.
  3. Click Unlink next to the organization.
  4. Confirm.

Conversations stay attached to the contact — only the organization tie is removed.

Verify it worked

  • Open the contact — the Linked organization shows the org you selected
  • Open the organization — its Contacts tab includes the linked contact
  • Send a test email from the contact — the organization context is available to the agent handling it

Patterns

  • B2B with consistent domains — Set up organizations with domains up front, let auto-link handle it
  • Personal-email contractor at a company — Manually link
  • Multi-domain holding company — Create one organization, configure additional domains in the org’s settings, auto-link works for all of them
  • VIP customer with multiple companies — Manually link to whichever org is the relevant relationship for support purposes

Troubleshooting

  • Symptom: The contact has a matching email domain but didn’t auto-link. Fix: Auto-link runs at contact creation time. If the organization was created after the contact, no auto-link happened. Link manually.

  • Symptom: The contact auto-linked to the wrong organization. Fix: This usually means two organizations have the same domain. Check the organizations list — domains should be unique. Unlink, fix the domain conflict, then re-link manually.

  • Symptom: I want to link an individual to multiple organizations. Fix: A contact can only be linked to one organization at a time. If you need multi-org membership, pick the primary org for support purposes; capture the others in custom fields.

  • Symptom: Search doesn’t find the organization I want to link. Fix: Confirm the organization exists. If it doesn’t, create it first (CRM → New contact → Organization), then come back and link.

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