How Tiledesk manages Contacts and Leads with its CRM
Actually Leads and Contacts are synonyms. We use the term “Lead” in developer docs while we use “Contact” in the UI.
A Contact aggregates requests and metadata collected during conversation(s) with a single user (Anonymous or Authenticated, see next Section).
Example of collected metadata:
- Fullname
- Last name
- Custom metadata
In general, if the user is connected as “Anonymous” a Lead is created automatically based on the user-id (the user-id is a random generated UUID during the anonymous authentication process). All next user conversations with this UUID will be aggregated in a single Lead.
An example
When a user first starts a conversation from a browser instance (i.e. Google Chrome) he will be asked for some metadata to follow up a conversation:
![When a user first starts a conversation from a browser instance (i.e. Google Chrome) he will be asked for some metadata to follow up a conversation:](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcb308060-55ac-4441-aeaf-70abbf3fb30f%2Fpasted%20image%200.png)
Then the user contacts the support another time, as you can see by conversations summary:
![Then the user contacts the support another time, as you can see by conversations summary:](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6648ce6c-be1b-4814-855d-2523d78d55f1%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(1).png)
Now in Contacts module you can search by email (andrea1@gmail.com) for the Lead:
![Now in Contacts module you can search by email (andrea1@gmail.com) for the Lead](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F56e26525-d146-45ef-a9cf-85c7dfd1ff89%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(2).png)
As you can see there is only one Contact with that email. Now in contact detail you can see all the two requests made by this user:
![As you can see there is only one Contact with that email. Now in contact detail you can see all the two requests made by this user](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F149e7395-8ee3-4546-8533-3dbcf3e44a1c%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(3).png)
If the user, with the same email, starts a request from another browser he will be assigned a new Anonymous user-id.
So, for example, if you start a new request from Safari (we started with Chrome browser):
![if you start a new request from Safari (we started with Chrome browser)](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f902be9-e4d7-40f6-93ea-dcd5ddfc4ab6%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(4).png)
As you can see the user is totally new (a new Anonymous user is created with a new UUID).
Now we insert the same email as in Chrome:
![Now we insert the same email as in Chrome](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fef9dc3b1-1ca3-458c-a274-6c85c963ca6a%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(5).png)
If we execute the same search as before, by email:
![If we execute the same search as before, by email](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67102850-0037-470a-a61a-7764efae71b4%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(6).png)
Now I find two Contacts, because they have a different UUID as you can see in the detail of the new Contact (Andrea Sp1):
![Now I find two Contacts, because they have a different UUID as you can see in the detail of the new Contact (Andrea Sp1)](https://eu.rtm.tiledesk.com/images?path=uploads%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1bf302a5-e697-4430-ab40-98fd924c9b62%2Fpasted%20image%200%20(7).png)
And this new user only made one conversation.
Actually we do not provide a feature to “merge” the two contacts into one (they are effectively the same user, recognized by their identical email, despite the two Contacts have different user-ids). This feature, with the ability to manually create and modify Contacts, is in our roadmap.