Contacts

What a contact is

A contact is a person who writes to your helpdesk. Every ticket belongs to exactly one contact, identified by their email address. A contact belongs to a single workspace, so the same address in two workspaces is two separate contacts.

You almost never have to create contacts. When a message arrives on one of your channels from an address nobody has written from before, There There creates the contact and attaches the ticket to it. From then on, everything that address sends lands on the same contact.

The contacts list

Open Contacts in the sidebar to see everyone who has written to your workspace. The table shows the name with the email address underneath, how many tickets the contact has opened, and when they were last active. You can sort on any of those three columns, and the search box matches on name and email.

If you do need to add someone by hand, for example to start an outbound conversation, use the New contact button. It asks for an email address and an optional name.

The list is scoped to the channels you can reach. A member with access to only some channels sees only the contacts who wrote to those channels, and the ticket counts are counted the same way.

The contact page

Click a contact to open their page. The header shows their avatar, name, email address, how many tickets they have opened, and when they were last active. Below that are two tabs.

Properties

The Properties tab is a form with the contact's name, email address, company, and notes. Notes are free text and are only ever visible to your team, so it is the right place for anything worth knowing before you reply. Change what you need and press Save.

Any member of the workspace can edit a contact. Correcting a name or a misspelled address is everyday work, so it is not restricted to admins.

Tickets

The Tickets tab lists every ticket this contact has opened, with the subject, the status, and when it was created. It has its own search box, and clicking a row opens that ticket in the inbox. Like the contacts list, it only shows tickets in channels you have access to.

Merging contacts

The same person often ends up as two contacts, usually because they wrote from a work address once and a personal one later. Merging folds them back into one.

Open the "..." menu on a row in the contacts list and pick Merge. A search box opens, already showing the contacts most likely to be the same person: the ones with the same name, and the ones writing from the same address on another domain. You can type to search every contact instead.

Pick one and There There asks you to confirm. The dialog shows both contacts side by side, states how many tickets are about to move, and has a swap button so you can flip which one survives. The one that survives keeps its name, notes, and company; anything it was missing is filled in from the other, and the notes of both are kept.

Custom fields follow the same rule, one field at a time. A field the surviving contact never answered takes the other contact's answer; a field it did answer keeps its own. A multi-select moves whole rather than blending: if both contacts picked options, the survivor keeps exactly the ones it had, because a combined list is an answer neither of you chose.

You do not have to accept any of that. The confirmation lists both contacts' values side by side, with the one the survivor ends up with highlighted, and every field is a radio you can point at the other value instead. Picking a side that holds nothing leaves the field empty rather than carrying the other value over. Notes have a third option, "Keep both", which is what they do by default. Swapping which contact survives clears anything you picked, because the two columns then mean the opposite of what they did when you picked it.

The email row is the exception: it has nothing to pick, because both addresses keep working either way.

The merged address does not disappear. It stays attached to the surviving contact, so mail from it keeps landing on the same person instead of creating a duplicate all over again. The merged contact simply stops showing up in your contacts list, and opening its old link tells you where its conversations went.

Nothing is deleted by a merge. Every ticket, message and value moves to the surviving contact, and what moved is recorded, so a merge made by mistake can be unpicked.

Merging is open to any member who can reach every channel in the workspace. A member with access to only some channels cannot merge, because the tickets moving between contacts include ones they are not allowed to read.

Deleting a contact

Deleting a contact is admin only, and it is destructive. It permanently removes the contact together with every ticket they ever opened, every message in those tickets, and every attachment. There is no undo, and the confirmation dialog tells you how many tickets are about to go.

You delete a contact from the "..." menu on their row in the contacts list. Members who are not admins do not see the option at all.

If you only want to stop grouping someone under a company, you do not need to delete anything. Set their company to "No company" on the Properties tab, or read more under companies.