Merge contacts

A customer emailed you from john.smith@example.com. Two months later they called from +15555550123 — a different identifier, so Atender created a separate contact. Now you have two records for the same person.

Merging combines them into one, with all conversation history, addresses, and custom field values preserved on the survivor.

Before you start

• You need at least two contacts that represent the same person
• Be confident the contacts really are duplicates — merging is one-way

Steps

1. Open the CRM.
2. Search for the contact (by name, email, or phone).
3. Identify the duplicates — there may be one obvious one, or several.
4. Open the merge tool. (Multi-select the duplicates from the list, or open a contact and use its Merge action.)
5. Pick the target contact — the one that survives. Atender suggests the one with the most conversations or oldest creation date.
6. Review the duplicates list. For each, review its emails, phones, and addresses.
7. Pick which emails and phones to keep vs. drop. By default, all unique values are kept and the oldest of any duplicate type/value combination becomes primary.
8. Click Merge.

The duplicates are deleted, and everything they had moves to the target.

What carries over to the target

• Conversations — All conversations from duplicates re-attach to the target. The target’s Conversations tab now contains everything
• Email addresses — All unique emails are kept on the target. Duplicates within a type are deduplicated
• Phone numbers — Same as emails — uniques kept, duplicates within a type deduplicated
• Other channel addresses (WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.) — All carried over
• Custom field values — The target’s values are kept. Non-conflicting values from duplicates are added to empty target fields
• Customer tier — The target’s tier is kept. (Pick the right target before merging)
• Linked organization — The target’s organization link is kept
• Attachments — All attachments from duplicates carry over to the target

The target’s name, type, and tier do not change. If you want a different name on the survivor, edit it after merging.

What gets deleted

The non-target contacts are deleted permanently. Their IDs no longer resolve. Anything that referenced them by ID now points to the target instead — conversations, attachments, custom fields are all reassigned.

Primary addresses after merge

After merge, each address type can still have only one primary. Atender picks the primary per type by:

1. The target’s primary, if it had one
2. Otherwise, the oldest matching address by createdAt

If the wrong address ends up primary, edit the contact and change which one is primary. See Edit a contact.

Verify it worked

• The duplicates are gone from the CRM list
• The target’s Conversations tab now contains every conversation from every merged contact
• The target’s address list contains the unioned set of emails / phones (deduplicated)
• Searching for any of the merged-away identifiers (an old email, an old phone) still finds the target — because that identifier is now on the target

Troubleshooting

• Symptom: Merge fails with “different contact types.” Fix: You can only merge contacts of the same type. Two individuals can merge; an individual and an organization cannot. (Linking an individual to an organization is a separate action — see Link a contact to an organization.)

• Symptom: I picked the wrong target. Fix: Merge is one-way. The non-target contacts are deleted. To “undo” you’d need to recreate them and re-attach addresses manually. Pick carefully before clicking Merge.

• Symptom: A conversation got linked to the merged contact, but the contact name in the conversation header is still the old one. Fix: Refresh the conversation. The header reads from the contact at render time, so a fresh load picks up the new identity.

• Symptom: Two records I’m sure are duplicates show different names. Fix: Atender doesn’t auto-suggest merges based on name similarity — only manual selection. Visually compare the records first; if you’re confident, proceed.

How to find duplicates

Atender doesn’t automatically prompt you to merge — it leaves duplicate detection to you. Patterns to find duplicates:

• Search by email — if two contacts come up for the same email, they’re duplicates
• Search by phone — same
• Filter by creation date — recent duplicates often appear in clusters when imports go wrong
• Filter by linked organization — multiple records under the same org with the same name are usually the same person