What is the CRM?
Every person who contacts your team through Atender becomes a CRM contact. Email, voice call, WhatsApp, SMS, web chat, Messenger — the moment they reach out, a contact record exists. No manual entry, no “create contact” step, no setup hurdle.
The CRM is the people layer behind every conversation. Open it to see who your customers are. Click a contact to see their three most recent conversations right on the Overview tab, with a View all button that opens the full history in the Conversations tab. The Details panel next to them shows the customer’s tier (when tiers are enabled) and the custom fields you’ve captured. Summarize conversations generates an AI summary of up to 25 of a contact’s most recently updated conversations on demand, so agents can catch up before reading individual threads. On supported platforms, you can also start outbound from a contact record. In the current iOS CRM, you can open a contact’s phone number in the device dialer, but outbound voice through Atender — including a newly created CRM-linked voice conversation — is not available there yet.
What the CRM gives you
- Auto-created contacts — Every inbound message creates or updates a contact — no manual entry
- Conversation history — The three most recent conversations appear on the contact’s Overview tab, with a View all button for the full history, plus an on-demand AI summary
- Custom fields — Extend the contact schema to match your business — text, number, date, select, checkbox
- Customer tiers — Up to 6 tiers you define (e.g. Gold, Platinum, VIP) with priority routing and visual badges
- Organizations — Group contacts under a company, link automatically by email domain
- Search — Find contacts by name, email, phone, or domain
- Direct outbound — On supported platforms, start outbound from a contact record. In the current iOS CRM, this opens the contact’s phone number in the device dialer; outbound voice through Atender, including a CRM-linked voice conversation, is not available there yet
- Attachments — Upload files to a contact (contracts, invoices, ID documents)
Two entity types: Contacts and Organizations
The CRM has two kinds of records:
- Contacts — individuals. A person with a name, emails, phones, custom fields
- Organizations — companies. A name, a domain, and member contacts who belong to it
Both live in the same list and have similar detail views. See Contacts and organizations for the full picture.
How contacts get created
A contact is created automatically the first time a person interacts with you:
- They send an email — contact created with that email address
- They call your support line — contact created with that phone number
- They start a web chat — contact created with the visitor identifier
- They message you on WhatsApp / Messenger / Instagram — contact created with the channel-specific identifier
You can also create contacts manually — useful for proactive outreach or for importing from another system.
Why the CRM matters
Atender separates conversations from people. A conversation is a single interaction. A contact is the relationship.
This means:
- The agent who handles today’s call may not have spoken with this customer before — but the full history is right there
- Customer tier and custom fields surface in the conversation view, so agents handle each customer with the right context
- Reporting can break down by customer tier, custom field, or organization
CRM as primary, or CRM as a complement
The Atender CRM can be your primary CRM if you don’t already have one. Or it can complement an existing CRM:
- Keep customer-facing identity (name, contact methods) in your existing CRM
- Use Atender’s CRM for the support-relationship layer (conversation history, agent notes, tier classification)
Custom fields and the API make a two-system setup workable. The Atender CRM is always the source of truth for conversation history and support interactions.
Who can see what
Access to contacts is scoped by role:
- Owners and Team Leads see all contacts in the tenant
- Agents also see all contacts in the tenant
- Specialist roles see what their permissions grant
Configure this in Roles & Permissions.
Where to start
- Look up a customer: open the CRM, search by name, email, or phone
- Add a contact manually: Create a contact
- Clean up duplicates: Merge contacts
- Use customer tiers: What are customer tiers?