Contact Center

What it is

The Contact Center is where your customer conversations and your customer records live. Conversations shows the chats your Agents handle on channels and lets a person take one over; Contacts holds one record per customer or organisation, which Agents read and update. Find it in the left menu under Inbox → Contact Center; its badge counts the conversations waiting for a person. The gear button opens Customer info settings.

Key concepts

• Channel — where a customer writes. Today conversations come from Messenger: a Facebook Page bound to an Agent by a Message Automation. The queue also offers a Zalo filter, but Zalo OA chats do not arrive here yet.
• Conversation — a customer's messages to one Page on one day, and the replies. Its status is one of:

Status	Meaning
Waiting for a message	The Agent has answered; nothing is pending.
Agent is working	The Agent is answering.
Needs a person	A person has the conversation; the Agent is not answering.

• Why a conversation needs a person — "The agent handed the conversation to a person"; "The sender sent too many messages while the agent was busy" (more than 20 waiting); "The message did not reach the customer" (a send failed or the Agent's run failed); "You are handling the conversation" (someone took over). A reply typed by staff in Facebook's own inbox also takes the conversation over ("Staff, outside FLAE").
• Contact — a Person or an Organisation: name, phone, email, address, Tags, Facts, Identities (Zalo, Messenger, Phone, Email, API), the people of an organisation (with a role and a Primary contact), a Brief, Events and Open work.
• Facts — what an Agent may remember about a customer, such as an allergy or a preferred time, stored in the Workspace's Customer info fields. A value edited by a person is marked "Edited by a person".
• Brief — a short profile the Agent writes after the first conversation, in three sections: Who they are, Value and risk, To remember. The Agent may propose lines ("Agent proposes") that you Accept or Dismiss; you can add, edit, delete and Pin lines ("Pinned by a person").
• Events — the contact's history: conversations, handoffs, notes, facts, contact updates, work and brief updates. Filter by source; System activity shows background changes.
• Open work — follow-ups for a contact, with an optional due date, created by a person, an Agent or the system. A question or approval that has waited 2 hours on a customer's conversation adds open work.
• Contact variables — an Agent reads the contact of its conversation through {{contact.*}}: {{contact.name}}, {{contact.phone}}, {{contact.email}}, {{contact.address}}, {{contact.tags}}, {{contact.facts.<key>}}, {{contact.notes}}, {{contact.brief}}, {{contact.organisation}}, {{contact.zalo_id}}, {{contact.facebook_id}}. See Agents for variables.

How it works

A Messenger conversation

1. A customer messages a Page whose Message Automation is On.
2. FLAE finds the Contact by the customer's Messenger identity, or creates one with the name from Facebook.
3. The Agent answers on Messenger: Agent is working, then Waiting for a message.
4. When the Agent hands over, or one of the reasons above applies, the conversation turns to Needs a person and a "Conversation needs a person" item appears in the Agent Inbox.
5. A person replies from FLAE. Messages the customer sends meanwhile wait for the Agent.
6. The person hands the conversation back with an optional note. The Agent reads the note, then answers the waiting messages.

Messenger's reply window — Messenger lets a Page reply within 24 hours of the customer's last message. From 24 hours to 7 days, FLAE sends with the Human Agent tag ("The message will be sent with the Human Agent tag"), if Meta has allowed it for the Page. After 7 days no reply is possible.

Where contacts come from — a first message on Messenger, an App event Automation that maps a phone or email (see Automations), an Agent, or Create contact.

Common tasks

Work the conversation queue

1. Open Contact Center → Conversations. Tabs: All, Needs a person, Handled by Agent, Done today. Filter by Status or channel, or search by name or message.
2. Conversations that need a person come first, longest waiting first.
3. Click one to read the thread. The right panel shows the customer profile: brief, tags and open tasks (Add task), with Open profile.

Take over and reply

1. Open the conversation and press Take over. If the Agent is mid-answer: "You take over when the running turn ends."
2. Write under Reply to the customer and press Send.
3. When done, use Hand back… and add an optional Note for the agent.

Find and manage contacts

1. Open Contacts. Columns: Contact, Channels, Brief, Open work, Last activity, Spent.
2. Quick views: All, Needs a person, Has open work, Not contacted lately (no contact for 60 days), Organisations. Search by name, phone or email, or filter by tag.
3. Press Create contact: choose Person or Organisation, a Name, and optionally Phone and Email.

Update a contact

• Edit details for name, phone, email and address. Add tag for tags.
• Add fact to record a value of a customer info field.
• Add channel under Identities to link a Zalo, Messenger, phone, email or API identifier. Removing one means "Messages from this channel will no longer reach this contact."
• Add organisation / Add person to link people to an organisation with a role.
• Add note in the Events stream; Add work under Open work, then Done or Dismiss.
• Write brief or edit its lines.

Delete, restore or export a contact

• More actions → Delete on the contact page: "The contact disappears from lists and search. An admin can restore it within 30 days."
• Customer info settings → Deleted contacts lists them with the days left; press Restore.
• More actions → Export data downloads all of the person's data as a JSON file.

Manage customer info fields

1. Open Customer info settings from the gear button.
2. Add field: a Label, a Key (lowercase letters, digits and underscores, starting with a letter, e.g. shoe_size) and a Type: Text, Number, Date, Yes / no or Choice (with Options, one per line).
3. Fields an Agent proposed appear under "Proposed by an Agent": Approve to let every Agent use it, or Reject.
4. Archive a field to hide it; its saved values are removed from every customer.

Limits and rules

• Everyone in the Workspace can open the Contact Center, and can create contacts and change their details and tags.
• Take over, reply and hand back: Workspace Admins, Builders and Operators, and Organization Owners and Admins. Builders and Operators reply only to conversations assigned to them or unassigned.
• Delete, Restore, Export data and customer info fields: Workspace Admins and Organization Owners and Admins.
• A deleted contact is removed for good after 30 days. A restored contact does not get its channel identities back; the next message or an edit adds them again.
• A contact has at most 30 tags of up to 40 characters each.
• The brief is kept up to date for customers with activity in the last 90 days or opened in the last 7 days.
• Nothing can be changed in an archived Workspace.

Related

• Automations — the Message Automations that bring conversations in, and the App event Automations that create contacts.
• Agent Inbox — escalations and approvals from conversations.
• Agents — escalation rules and {{contact.*}} variables in instructions.
• Runs — the Agent work behind each conversation.
• Knowledge — the Public Knowledge Bases Agents read in conversations.