How to Store and Manage Contact Properties

In this article we will explain how you can set up and modified your contact properties for your live chat. Contact Properties can be very useful when managing your live chat conversations with visitors and keeping track of important information about your users and leads. Before you can store custom details about your contacts (order number, shoe size, etc), you need to define the ‘properties’ for each piece of information.  

What are Contact Properties?

Contact Properties are custom field data that you can assign to your visitors, leads, and customers. The Contact Properties assigned to the contacts are then stored in the Contacts list. You can use these properties to filter and segment your customer lists, trigger proactive invites, or simply report on your contact data.

How to set up Custom Contact Properties

With Social Intents, the first step for assigning contact properties to your customers and leads is to click on the Settings icon in the lower left hand side of your navigation bar.  

You'll see a Properties link which will list each of your contact properties.

To add a new property, select the Add Property button on the upper right corner of the page.  You'll see a dialog box popup where you can enter the property name, the property key, and a description.

Property Name - This is the name of the property when it's displayed in the contact list when you edit your contacts

Property Key - This value is the key you can use when importing contacts or triggering events using this property.  

Description - This is a readable description of the property for tracking purposes.

Once you enter the Contact Property details, click save to store your new property.  Your contact properties will be listed on the page once you have added your properties.

Viewing Contact Properties in your Contact List

Now that you've added custom contact properties for your contacts, you can view and modify these properties on each of your contacts.

Head over to the Contacts link in Social Intents and click on a specific contact.  You'll see the new values listed here.  Simply click the Edit icon on the contact to add your values to the custom contacts for your users.

Importing Contacts with custom properties

Sometimes you will want to trigger custom events and outbound actions on your contacts like sending messages, alerts, and reminders from Social Intents using custom contact properties.  To do this, simply import your contacts that include the column headers that match your custom property Property Keys as their name in additional to the core contact information.  

When importing we provide a default import template you can use as starting point.  To import, click on the Contacts link, then in the upper right side, select the Import Contacts options.  Then use your import file that includes the custom contact properties and we'll automatically add these fields to your imported contacts.  You can add things like ship dates for orders, order ids, etc.  Then you can set outbound events to message your contacts with this information.