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 every conversation they’ve ever had with you, who handled it, what came of it, what custom fields you’ve captured, and what tier they’re on.
What the CRM gives you
- Auto-created contacts — Every inbound message creates or updates a contact — no manual entry
- Conversation history — Every prior conversation with a contact, in chronological order
- Custom fields — Extend the contact schema to match your business — text, number, date, select, checkbox
- Customer tiers — VIP / Gold / Silver classification 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 — Call a contact directly from their record
- 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 typically see contacts whose conversations they have access to
- 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?