How the CRM and your conversations fit together

Short answer: your CRM and your conversations are connected. Link a conversation to a contact or company, and that conversation lands with that customer and you build up a history. The linking you do from the conversation; managing the contacts themselves happens in the CRM.

How it works together

From a conversation you link the right contact or company in the context panel, see Linking a conversation to a contact or company. From then on, that conversation belongs to that customer.

In the CRM you manage the contacts and companies apart from any specific conversation: completing details, cleaning up duplicates, linking companies and people to each other. The better that's maintained, the more context you have at each conversation.

Looking at the conversations of one contact or company

Open a contact or company in the CRM and you land straight in the edit form. Next to the Details tab there's a second tab, Conversations, with that customer's history. Click a conversation and it opens in the inbox, in a new window.

At the top of that tab are four numbers: the total number of conversations, how many are still open, how many ever went to a human, and when the last conversation was.

Mind one quirk: those numbers count everything, while the list below shows the 50 most recent conversations. For a customer with a lot of history, the counter is therefore higher than the number of rows you can click. To go back further, search from the inbox on the name or the company, not on email address. See Searching and filtering conversations.

The tab only appears on an existing record, since a new contact has nothing to show yet, and it's available to admins only.

For a company, two sources are added together: the conversations of its contact people, and the conversations of visitors who were recognised on this company through an ERP connection without ever being linked to a contact. Those last rows show "Via the ERP connection" instead of a name. For a company you created yourself, that second part stays out, so there you only see the conversations of its contact people.

A recognised ERP sign-in fills your CRM regardless of your capture setting

If you work with a verified identity from an external system, a webshop sign-in for example, different rules apply than for the contact form in the chat.

The "ask for contact details" setting is skipped. That setting is about what you ask the visitor, and an identity verified on the server isn't a question to the visitor. So even on disabled, contacts and companies are still created and updated. Turn capture off to avoid building up CRM data and you won't achieve that for recognised webshop visitors.

Matching happens on the external ID, not on the name. Sarrai looks first at the combination of source system and external ID, and only then at the email address or company name. One external record therefore stays attached to the same CRM record, even when it's renamed externally.

An existing record is adopted. If a manually created contact or company already exists with the same name or email address, that record gets the external ID attached instead of a duplicate appearing.

The server wins over what the visitor types. Name, email, and company come from the external system; the contact form only fills the gaps, such as a phone number.

One thing happens quietly there: if a name or email change from the external system would clash with another active record in your CRM, Sarrai leaves both records alone. No notification, no task. Your CRM then drifts apart from the external system without anyone noticing.

Good to know

The gain is in the repetition: on a second or third conversation with the same customer, you see right away who it is and what was going on before, without having to ask again.

When a visitor fills in their details in the chat, Sarrai updates an existing contact on an email match, and a differing name or company overwrites the existing field. And for requests around data deletion: the data export doesn't include contacts or conversations, so such a deletion today takes manual work or support, not a single button.

Also searched as

"build up customer history", "attach a conversation to a customer", "overview per contact", "why link a conversation to the crm", "see all conversations of a customer", "why does the conversations tab show fewer rows than the counter"

See also

• Linking a conversation to a contact or company
• Managing contacts