The Contacts module allows you to easily manage your contacts and work with them as efficiently as possible. Whether it’s just yours, or you want to share it with a smaller team, or have anyone in your department or company work with it.
Contacts – whether current clients or customers or potential ones – are the cornerstone of any company or business. Without them, there is no business. Without new ones, there will be no growth. Without systematic work with those acquired, the business will decline as will the customers.
Therefore, to truly manage and grow your business, keeping track of your contacts and actively working with them must be a top priority.
When using the module and working with your contacts in FreshFlow, you will appreciate:
- Variability – you can do one action in multiple ways depending on the situation, for example, adding contacts.
- Flexibility – you can create your own views, sort, label and label your contacts.
- Quick overview – see the contact’s activity history, tasks, inserted documents and operations performed on the contact.
- Connectivity with other modules – from a contact you can create events in Calendar or task in Tasks and vice versa, events and tasks are written to individual contacts (when you add them).
- Sharing – you can lend contacts on a short-term basis, share them on a long-term basis or donate them for good.
Get to know the module and what you can do with your contacts.
What you will find here
This article describes the following functionality of Contacts and how to use it (click on a topic to scroll quickly through the page):
1. Adding and importing new contacts
2. Contact detail and data editing
4. Search in contacts and comments
5. History of activities and tasks at the contact
6. Creating new events, tasks and projects with a contact
7. Inserting files to a contact
8. Displaying and sorting contacts
9. Labelling and filtering contacts
10. What else you can find in the contact details
11. Other operations with contacts
Have you tried FreshFlow?
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1. Adding and importing new contacts
You can add new contacts to FreshFlow in four different ways.
There are several of them so that you can choose the most suitable one according to the situation when you want to add a contact and also according to the number of contacts and the amount of data related to them.
We’ve experienced first-hand that sometimes you can quickly add one contact with minimal information – just a last name, for example – and other times you’ll want to import hundreds or thousands of contacts with detailed information.
Here are all the options for every situation.
1.1. Quickly add individual contacts
You probably already know how to quickly add one or a few contacts with minimal information from the article First steps in FreshFlow.
In Contacts, simply click the New Contact icon:
This will open a dialog box for filling in the basic details of the contact – you can think of it as a table of five columns.
To enter a new contact, you can fill in all five columns or just some of them – just the last name if you don’t know more:
If you would like to view more or fewer columns (items to contact) in this dialog, you can add or subtract them by clicking the gear icon in the top right.
Use the “+” button to add another contact (row to the table).
Use the middle button with the tick symbol to save your contacts and close the dialog box. When you close the dialog box, you will return to the contacts view and see the one or more contacts you have just added.
1.2. Create a contact when entering an event in Calendar
You can also quickly create a new contact where it’s convenient – in the Calendar for a new event.
Some of the events – phone calls or meetings – you’ll want to record in Calendar will naturally be with people you don’t already have in Contacts.
It’s useful to have these contacts in FreshFlow so that you can start recording their history from the first interaction. But don’t worry, you don’t have to go from Calendar (once you’ve set a date) to Contacts and back again to do this.
Simply type the first name, last name, and phone number of the new contact (and any other information you want for the event) into the contact entry box in Calendar for the new event, and save the event.
You will see a hint in the window:
After saving the Calendar event, it writes the new contact to the Contacts module.
Hopefully only you will notice the following abbreviation and no one else…
Sometimes you won’t want to write your first name or phone number. You may not even know them. So to create a new contact, you only need to type one letter (or the word “name”) or one digit. However, you must enter a total of three elements representing first name, last name and phone number.
Of course, don’t forget to add the name or number and update the contact later.
1.3. Adding individual contacts with details
You will have more time to add some contacts. You may also want to record more information with them.
In these cases, use the “Add contact in detail” function.
You can find it in the menu that opens when you click on the icon of three horizontal lines hiding more functions:
In the dialog box to create a new contact, fill in the items you know and save the contact:
Remember to click the “Save” button to save the new information.
When you close the dialog box, you will return to the list of contacts and see the contact you just added.
1.4. Bulk import of contacts
You can bulk import multiple contacts into FreshFlow at once, including larger databases.
The specific process will vary depending on devices and operating systems – for example, you can import contacts from Google Contacts, from an Android phone, from an iPhone or iPad, from the macOS calendar. Instructions for each can be found in the Help.
The easiest way to import contacts into FreshFlow is from an excel spreadsheet.
Start by searching for the import function – you’ll find it in the menu that opens when you click on the three horizontal lines that hide more functions:
When you click on it, a dialog box for importing contacts will open, from where you can download the template:
The template contains instructions for laying out the contacts into pre-selected columns and then inserting them into the import dialog.
For detailed instructions on how to import using this template, see the Help.
Before you send imported contacts, you can tag them with labels – such as the import date or campaign number or other identifier – to distinguish them from those you already have in FreshFlow or will add later. Read more about labeling below.
Just as you can import contacts in bulk, you can also export them in bulk. For more information on exporting, see More operations with contacts below .
2. Contact detail and data editing
To add and update information for individual contacts, click on the contact in the contact list view.
A window will open with the contact details. In the left half of the window you will see descriptive information, in the right half you will see the history of activities and tasks.
To add and edit descriptive information such as phone, email, address and more, click the pencil icon near the contact’s name:
In the left half of the dialog box, the standard items for each contact are displayed for editing:
Once entered, save the new data by clicking the “Save” button to return to the contact detail view.
Then close the contact detail preview dialog by clicking the “Close” button in the bottom right corner to return to the contact list.
4. Search in contacts and comments
We recommend starting the familiarization tour in the Contacts module (first icon on the top left).
This is mainly because when you create an event in the calendar or write a new task in the next steps, you may (but don’t have to) assign the already created contact to it.
4.1. Quickly find a contact
With the search function, you don’t have to scroll through the entire list to find a specific contact.
Simply enter the contact you are looking for – most often a surname – in the search window:
In the same way, you can search for a phone number or even an email if you know it and want to find out who it belongs to.
If you want to know which of your contacts lives in the city you’re going to, you can enter the city in the search box and so on…
4.2. Fulltext search in comments
In addition to clearly defined items such as last name or city, you can search for “non-item” words, phrases, and pieces of text that you’ ve written in the comments for each contact (not the event notes):
When is this feature useful?
For example, if you want to find all contacts who use a product or service, even a competitor’s (search for “service XY”) and you want to reach out to them. If it should only be contacts that already use one of your services, it is a good idea to label them, see below.
Or there’s a World Cup, you have tickets and you want to invite your contacts who like hockey – so you search for “hockey”.
The assumption, of course, is that you have written this down in their comments before, which is related to the strategy of writing information in comments (see above).
4.3. Advanced Search
You can also search your contacts by specific system entries.
For example, by last activity (who you tefoned) or by activity outcome (who you closed the deal with) or future activity (who you will interview).
To view the options for advanced searches, click on the arrow at the end of the search box:
In addition to searching by activity, you can also select from other items in the contact details (individual contact details).
5. History of activities and tasks at the contact
We’ve already touched on the history of activities and tasks related to a particular contact in the context of the Calendar event notes.
By linking all FreshFlow modules, calls and appointments from Calendar and tasks from Tasks are automatically “transcribed” to each contact.
This gives you an overview of the history of interactions with a given contact (when you click on a specific contact from the contact list) without the need for additional notes and basically in one click:
To keep track of events and tasks in your contacts’ history, you need to assign contacts to them. That’s why it’s a good idea to start with FreshFlow by writing down your contacts (see the article First steps in FreshFlow).
However, to avoid having to first create a contact in Contacts and then click through to Calendar or Tasks, you can create a new contact directly in an event or task (see Option 1.2. above).
Or you can still create new events and tasks directly from a specific contact.
6. Creating new events, tasks and projects with a contact
When you’re looking at a specific contact – looking at history, writing down information in comments, editing a contact’s details or talking to a person on the phone – you often need to write down a task or reminder in your calendar.
To avoid having to go to Tasks or Calendar at this point, you can create a task or event directly from a contact.
Use the menu at the right edge of the preview window, which opens when you click a specific contact from the list of all contacts:
6.1. Create a new event
To create a new event in Calendar – whether it’s a phone call or a meeting – tap the New Activity button.
The event preview window opens, where you fill in all the parameters and save the event, just as you would in Calendar:
After saving, you will immediately see the event you just entered in the history of the contact (and of course in the Calendar).
6.2. Create a new task
To create a new task in Tasks, first click Tasks in the right-hand menu and then click New Task.
The task preview window opens, where you fill in all the parameters and save the task as you would in the Tasks module:
Once saved, you will immediately see the task you just entered in the task list for that contact (and, of course, among all tasks in the Tasks module).
6.3. Setting up a new project
Did you know that you’ll be setting up several tasks at once with one contact?
If they are related, group them into one project (or create more projects).
To create a new project for a contact, first click Projects in the right menu and then click New Project.
In the project preview window, fill in the project name plus any other items you want and save the project:
Then create your first (and next) task in the project by clicking the New Task button and filling in the details as for each task above:
To close the task and project preview windows, click Save. You can then see the project and tasks in the contact’s details, as well as in the Tasks module.
7. Inserting files to a contact
The option to insert files and documents can be found in the contact detail (after clicking from the list of all contacts) in the right column of the dialog box (item “Documents”).
When you click on the “Documents” text, you will see a space with documents in the activity history section (empty if you haven’t inserted any yet or with a list of those you have already inserted).
To insert a new document, click on the “Insert document” button:
Before inserting, you can indicate the purpose of the document – whether it is for a specific activity (meeting) or contact in general, or whether it is a consent to the processing of personal data if you use it.
Then click on the “Save” button to save the file:
You will see a list of the inserted files in a dialog box at any time in the future.
For a better overview, you can sort them in descending and ascending order by individual columns (e.g. by name or date of insertion) or remove some columns and not show them at all:
When you need the files and you no longer have them on your computer, you can download them at any time (click on the blue icon next to the file).
When you no longer need the files, you can delete them (by clicking on the red icon next to the file) to free up space in the FreshFlow repository.
8. Displaying and sorting contacts
Flexibility in the display and ordering of contacts is essential for efficient work with them. In FreshFlow, you can do virtually anything you want with your contacts.
8.1. Data display (columns)
Do you want to choose which data (columns) will be displayed when you preview contacts in bulk?
To select columns (data), click on the “gear” icon in the top bar (you will find it at the bottom right) and then click on “Columns”. Then select the data you want to display from the list:
To remove columns (data) that you do not want to display, just “un-click” the data.
8.2. Ordering and moving columns
Do you want to view the data in a different order than the system order? Maybe the company before the phone number or the city before the contact?
Then simply drag the columns left or right with your mouse – in the column name bar, left-click (and hold) the column name and drag:
The new column order is automatically saved.
8.3. Order of contacts
Want to sort your contacts by any of the data? Perhaps by alphabet, next event date, zip code or city?
Then, just click once on the column name in the top column title bar and the contacts will be sorted by that entry in ascending order (from first to last). If you click again, the order will be in descending order (from last to first).
The direction of the sorting is shown by a small arrow in the box – see sorting by surname in the GIF (moving image) above.
9. Labelling and filtering contacts
Unlike sorting all contacts continuously from the beginning or end (see above), you can also select or filter only some contacts – provided you label them.
9.1. What are labels (tags)
Tags are labels that you can use to mark contacts for differentiation and subsequent grouping (filtering).
For example, among all the contacts collected in FreshFlow, you cannot distinguish which one is already a client or still “just” a contact. So, when someone buys your product or service from you, you tag them as a “Client” and then you can view the tagged contacts by “filtering” them from all the others.
9.2. Creating and editing labels
We will discuss labels and working with them in more detail in the next article. Here we will show the basic procedures.
Click on the “Labels” button to open a preview window for working with them. Before you do that, note that you can mark several tags as “favourites” to speed up access to your tagged contacts:
In the preview window, you’ll see that the labels are organized into folders – the same way you store your files in folders today.
You can now create a new label or folder in the top menu, or search for a specific label later (when you have more). You can also mark labels as favourites:
Click on the “New Label” button to enter a label name, check the folder where you want the label to be saved, and select a label color by clicking. You then save the label you entered in this way:
After that, you will see the new label in the list in that folder. If you didn’t mark it as a favourite in the previous step, you can do so here. And by clicking on the three dots at the end of the label row, you can choose to edit or delete the label:
When you close the labels window, if you’ve marked a new label as a favourite, you’ll see it in the contacts view:
The number in brackets indicates the number of contacts marked with the label. So now all that’s left to do is to tag a contact (notice that none of the contacts are tagged in the picture above).
9.3. Contact labelling
You can tag contacts in two ways: either as a bulk (accelerated) or individually from the contact detail.
Accelerated (bulk) contact labelling
You can tag one or more contacts quickly by selecting the contact(s) by clicking on the square in front of the contact. When you do this, new buttons will appear in the top menu to add or remove labels:
Click the “Add” button in the following window to select the label or labels you want to assign to the selected contacts. You can also click the “+” icon in this window to create a new label (so you don’t have to create one before you select contacts for bulk labeling):
After saving and closing the preview window, you will see how many contacts are newly labeled with that label and the label will appear for each contact:
Labelling from contact details
You can also label an individual contact from the detail – after clicking on the contact in the preview window, select the label or labels you want to label the contact with. Alternatively, as above, you can create a label that does not yet exist by clicking on the “+” icon:
9.4. How to filter by tags
There are many uses of labels for quick selection (filtering) of contacts. For example:
- Distinguishing clients (customers) from others (who have not yet bought)
- Designation according to the product or service the client has purchased
- Divided into steps of the sales process (leads, offers, work in progress, clients)
- Identify the source of the contact (referral, Facebook, Linkedin, web, database, etc.)
- Breakdown into weeks or months for call or service
- Indication of preferred method of communication (phone, email, chat)
And of course there are more and more possibilities. It’s up to your creativity and system of work.
Once you have your contacts labeled and want to view them by label, you have two options:
By popular tags
Labels that you plan to use frequently to filter your contacts and mark as favourites (either when you set them up or later, see 9.2 above) will appear in the top bar when you preview your contact list.
You can then easily filter the contacts marked with the label with a single click on the label. You can also make a selection using multiple labels at once.
To cancel the filter of one label, either click on the label again or click on the “Cancel filter” button to cancel the filter of all labels:
From the list of all labels
You can filter contacts by any label (of course, you have to label the contact first).
Click on the “Labels” button in the top menu to view all the labels you have created and saved in your folders. In the dialog box, “check” the label or labels you want to filter by and click the “Filter” button:
You can then deselect (filter) as above – either by clicking individual labels or completely by clicking the “Deselect filter” button.
10. What else you can find in the contact details
Above we have shown that you can create events, tasks and projects and insert documents in the contact detail view.
In addition, you will also find information about sharing, handling and consent to the processing of personal data next to the contact .
10.1. Overview of sharing
Under Sharing, you can check or remind yourself who and what type of sharing you share the contact with:
10.2. Operations with contact
Under Contact operations, you will find an overview of technical information about who did something with the contact and when:
10.3. Consent of the contact to the processing of personal data
If you collect consent for the processing of personal information from clients or customers, or candidates for work or cooperation, and you insert it as a document with the contact, this document will be displayed under Contact consent:
11. Other operations with contacts
You can perform even more operations with your contacts in FreshFlow (you can find them in the top bar by clicking on the three horizontal lines icon):
- To lend to an appeal or other campaign
- Share
- Permanently convert
- Manually merge
- Export
- Delete
11.1. Lending to a proclamation or other campaign
Lending your contacts means that you lend all or some of your contacts to a colleague, assistant or external call centre for a limited period of time to call (the prerequisite is that they have a FreshFlow user account and you are connected to each other).
After the time period for which you borrowed the contacts (or you can “take them back” even earlier), the contacts will be automatically returned to you with new comments and activity history. At the same time, the colleague (assistant, call centre) loses access to them.
You can find specific instructions on how to borrow contacts in the help section.
11.2. Sharing with another user
Sharing contacts means that you and a colleague can work with your contacts at the same time, so you can add activities, tasks and comments, and upload files. You can see what’s happening with your contacts online. Which is the main difference between sharing and borrowing.
Again, the prerequisite is that colleagues (assistant, call center) have a user account in FreshFlow and you are connected to each other.
Similar to renting, you can limit the sharing period or you can share contacts without limit until you end it.
You can find specific instructions on how to share contacts in the Help.
11.3. Transfer contacts to another user
Transferring means permanently moving your contacts to a colleague, so you lose access to them (a colleague can lend, share or transfer them back to you). Again, the colleague must have a FreshFlow account and you must be connected to each other.
You cannot transfer contacts that are currently borrowed or shared. You must first “download” these contacts back.
You can find specific instructions on how to convert your contacts in the Help.
11.4. Manual merging of contacts
In cases where you want to merge two contacts into one (for example, if you have kept one contact twice or want to make two contacts in your company or family into one), you can use the manual merge function.
After the merge, the merged contact’s details are overwritten in the Comments field of the main contact (which you will want to keep) and its activities and tasks, past and future, are transferred to the history. All documents, notes and labels are moved to the main contact anyway.
You can find the specific procedure for manually merging contacts in the Help.
11.5. Export of contacts
You can export all or just selected (manually or tagged) contacts from FreshFlow as an Excel file as a backup or bulk add new data and then import them back into FreshFlow.
Only contacts that belong to you will be included in the export, i.e. not those that have been shared or borrowed.
You can find specific instructions on how to export your contacts in the Help.
11.6. Deleting a contact
You can delete unwanted contacts either individually or in bulk. Remember that the documents you have entered will be deleted along with the contacts.
In the case of an individual contact, “check” the contact and then go to the right side of the row where you can click on the three dots to open the features window. From there, click “Delete”:
If you want to delete several contacts in bulk, you can also mark them with a check mark and open the menu for further operations (three lines icon) in the top bar. In the window that opens, click “Delete”:
12. Settings for companies
In FreshFlow, you can work with contacts in one of two settings:
- As an individual, your contacts belong to you and you share them with other users.
- As a company – the contacts belong to the company and all users have the same access to them.
The difference is in the access to and possibilities of handling contacts.
Settings for individuals
This is the default setting of the Contacts module after creating an account in FreshFlow. If you work independently (most often as an individual on an IČO) and the contacts will belong to you only, you do not need to do anything else. Just start adding contacts.
When you want to share, lend or give your contacts to an assistant, colleague or external call centre to call, use one of the sharing features.
Settings for companies or branches
In case you consider contacts, customers and clients as corporate and you want to provide the same access to all users from your company without the need to share or transfer contacts, you can set this up in FreshFlow.
For security reasons, only the FreshFlow corporate account administrator has this authority. The option to switch the Contacts module to a company profile will be available in the Settings tab when you become an administrator.
3. Writing comments and displaying notes
For each contact, you can write down information beyond the items that FreshFlow provides “hardcoded” (phone, email, etc.).
Some information can be continuously recorded in the contact details (comments), some information is only displayed (activity notes).
Understanding the difference between comments and annotations is particularly important for writing down other information and then searching through it.
3.1. What are comments and how to use them
Comments are additional information that you want to add to the contact in the form of text. I deliberately do not use the word “notes” – see below.
A typical example is personal information about the contact, their preferences, their situation, and even the products and services they use, whether from you or a competitor.
You can find the space for comments in the contact details, in the left half of the dialog:
You can add and update your comments at any time. Changes and new text are automatically saved. You don’t have to click any buttons. After entering the text, you can close the contact detail using the button on the bottom right.
Because FreshFlow can search the text of comments, think about the phrases and terms you want to use when entering information into comments and use them for all contacts.
For the name of the product or service, use the same designation, e.g. “product XY”. When you are interested in software that clients use, always write it down with the letters “SW” plus the name. When writing down information about family and children, always use the word “children” even if there is only one in the family. Then search by these “keywords” – see below.
3.2. What are notes and where to look for them
Notes are text information that you have recorded for an event in Calendar:
Why do we mention notes for Calendar events here, in the context of contacts?
Because these notes are displayed in the activity history for each contact (see below). And you can even edit them retrospectively, after the event has passed.
In addition, as you can see in the image below, the history also shows the tasks you have set for the contact.
So you have an overview of what you’ve discussed with a given contact during each event at the click of a button:
And why do we pause on contact comments and event notes?
Because when you search in FreshFlow contacts , it only goes through the text in the comments, not the comments.
Adapt your strategy for writing down information and then searching through it.
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