Adding Other Ways to Reach a Customer

Availability: all plans

A household is rarely one person on one email address. A customer may give you a second email, a spouse's mobile number, a tenant's number or a property manager's address. Instead of creating a second customer record for each, you add these to the one customer as additional contacts. The customer keeps one history of jobs, invoices and notes, and a booking that arrives on any of these details is recognised as the same customer.

Each customer has one primary email and one primary phone. These are the details ServiceVisit uses when it has to pick one. Everything else you add is an additional contact, and a single value is only ever in one place: it is either primary or an additional contact, never both.

Before you start

You need permission to edit customers (the ability to create and update customer relationships). Without it, the Edit Customer button does not appear on the customer's page.
Know at least an email address or a phone number for the new contact. A contact with neither cannot be saved.
Phone numbers are stored as digits and shown formatted, for example (512) 555-0100.

Steps

Open Customers and select the customer.
Select Edit Customer at the top of the customer's page.
Scroll to the card titled Other ways to reach them. Contacts already added are listed there; if there are none it says "No other contacts yet."
In the row of fields at the bottom of the card, fill in what you know:
- Name: the person this reaches, if they are not the customer themselves (for example a spouse or tenant). Leave it empty when it is simply the same person's second email or number.
- Email: the email address.
- Phone: the phone number.
- Label: a short word in your own terms, such as Mobile, Work or Tenant. It is free text, up to 50 characters, and it is there so you can tell two numbers apart.
Select Add. The contact appears in the list with its label, email and phone. A "verified" note appears next to an email or phone that has been confirmed.

To take a contact off the customer, select Remove on its row. To use a contact as the main way to reach the customer, see the guide on making a contact primary.

What gets recorded

Every addition and removal is written to the customer's activity history with the contact's details and who made the change. Email addresses are saved in a standard lowercase form so that a later match on the same address always works, however it was typed.

Tips

Use Name only when the contact is a different person. If you give a name, ServiceVisit treats the row as that person's details.
If you need to correct a contact, remove it and add it again with the right details. A corrected email or phone starts out unverified, because verification belongs to the exact value that was confirmed.
The primary email and phone stay in the Customer Information card at the top of the same page. Change those there, not in the additional contacts list.
The explanation on the card says that a booking arriving on any of these contacts is recognised as this customer instead of creating a duplicate.

If something goes wrong

If you select Add with both Email and Phone empty, the page shows "Add an email address or a phone number."
If the page shows "That contact could not be saved. Please check the details and try again.", check that the email address and the phone number are each written correctly.
If Edit Customer is missing, your role does not include editing customers. Ask the person who manages your team's roles.
If Remove shows "That contact could not be removed.", reload the customer and try again; the contact may already have been removed.

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