Understand Contacts and customer profiles
Use Contacts and conversation context to understand shoppers while respecting identity, permissions, and data quality.
Contacts brings customer and visitor context together so teams can understand who is interacting with the Agent. A profile can be enriched by information collected in chat and linked operational records, but the completeness of a profile depends on what the shopper shared and what integrations provide.
This guide explains where to find contacts, how to move from a conversation to customer context, and how to avoid treating an anonymous visitor or incomplete record as a fully identified customer.
How this fits into Humind
Humind separates configuration, daily operations, customer data, and measurement so that each change can be reviewed in the right place. The navigation is permission-aware: two teammates in the same company may legitimately see different areas.
Treat configuration as a controlled workflow. Confirm the active company, make one coherent change, test the customer journey, and only then use the live channel. This makes unexpected behavior easier to trace and avoids mixing content, design, and deployment problems.
Before you start
Access: Contacts requires contacts read access. Editing contact data or related operational records requires contacts write access and may be restricted by role.
- Confirm that you are working in the correct company and market.
- Define the customer question you are trying to answer before searching.
- Use only information needed for the support, sales, or operational task.
Step-by-step workflow
Open Contacts and choose the right record
Open Contacts from the main navigation. Search with a reliable identifier available to your team, such as a known email or name. Review similar results carefully instead of assuming the first match is the same person.
A visitor may remain anonymous or have only partial information. The absence of an email or phone number is not a system error when the shopper did not provide it or the configured pre-chat survey did not request it.
Use Inbox for conversation context
When the question starts from a conversation, open the thread and review the shopper context, message history, product references, support information, notes, tags, and tickets. This provides the immediate reason for contact.
Do not copy internal notes into a customer-facing reply. Notes can contain operational context intended only for teammates.
Interpret identity carefully
Treat identity fields as evidence, not assumptions. A shared email address, copied phone number, or repeated browser session can make two interactions look related. Verify the detail with the shopper when it affects an account, order, appointment, or sensitive request.
If the pre-chat survey or consent configuration changes, new conversations may contain different profile fields from older ones. Document the effective date when that distinction matters.
Complete the operational action
Use the contact record and conversation together to answer, assign follow-up, update a ticket, or escalate. Add only necessary internal context and leave a clear next step for the team.
When a record looks incorrect or duplicated, do not overwrite information speculatively. Escalate to the company administrator or data owner with the exact records and evidence that need review.
Permissions and important caveats
- Contacts and Inbox are permission-gated and may not be visible to every role.
- Anonymous or partial profiles are expected when the shopper has not supplied identifying information.
- Presence or recent activity does not by itself prove customer identity.
- Apply the company's privacy and retention rules when viewing or changing customer information.
Verify the result
Use this checklist before considering the work complete:
- The record belongs to the active company and correct market.
- Identity-sensitive actions use verified details rather than inferred browser or conversation data.
- The conversation, contact, tags, notes, and ticket state tell a consistent story.
- The next operator can understand what was verified and what remains uncertain.
Troubleshooting
A customer cannot be found
Try the identifiers actually collected in the conversation, check the active company and market, and review the Inbox thread. The shopper may still be anonymous or may have used different contact details.
Two profiles appear to describe the same person
Do not merge or overwrite based only on similarity. Compare verified identifiers and conversation context, then ask the company data owner to review the records through the approved process.
Contact details are missing from recent chats
Review Chat survey settings to see which fields are requested and whether consent is required. Missing fields are expected when they were not requested or the shopper did not complete them.