The contact record: what's stored and how it's organized

Every person you talk to, sell to, or market to lives in your account as a contact record — one page that collects everything you know about them and everything that's happened with them. Before you start importing lists or building automations, it's worth knowing what's actually on that page and where each piece of information goes.

#The three panels

Open any contact and you'll see the page split into three working areas.

• Left panel — contact information. Name, email, phone, profile photo, and the fields you've filled in for this person. A Hide Empty Fields toggle keeps the panel short when most fields are blank, and a search box lets you jump straight to a specific field instead of scrolling. Tags live here too, with an Apply/Cancel step so you don't accidentally add one while typing.
• Center panel — conversations and activity. Every text, email, call, and note with this contact, in one chronological feed, plus appointment and opportunity events mixed in. This is where you catch up on a contact in ten seconds instead of hunting across five tabs.
• Right panel — action modules. A collapsible set of tabs: Activities, Associations, Opportunities, Tasks, Notes, Appointments, Documents, and Payments. The panel remembers whichever tab you had open last, so if you live in Tasks, it stays on Tasks the next time you open a contact.

Tip: Arrow keys move you between contacts while you're on the detail page, and Escape collapses the right panel — useful if you're working through a list of contacts one at a time and want to keep your hands off the mouse.

#Standard fields vs. custom fields

Every contact automatically has a set of standard fields: name, email, phone, address, and a few others that exist for every account. Custom fields are ones you or your team created because they matter to your specific business — a preferred appointment type, a budget range, a membership number. Both live in the same left panel and both can be filled in manually, by a form submission, by an import, or by an automation.

Because custom fields are stored on the contact itself, any form, workflow, or smart list in your account can read or write to them — they're not tied to whichever form first captured the answer.

#Tags: the quick, informal label

Tags are short labels you attach to a contact to mark a status, interest, or source — "hot lead," "webinar-2026," "vip." They're the fastest way to segment contacts because:

• You can add or remove them right from the contact record, from a smart list row, or in bulk across many contacts at once.
• Workflows can trigger when a tag is added or removed, so tagging someone can kick off an automation without any other action.
• Smart lists can filter on "has tag" or "does not have tag" to build a live segment.

Tags aren't a replacement for custom fields — use a tag for a yes/no state or category, and a custom field when you need to store an actual value (a date, a number, free text).

#Notes: the internal record of context

Notes are for your team, not the contact. Use them to log a call summary, a reminder about a preference, or context another teammate will need before they follow up. Notes appear in the center activity feed alongside messages and calls, so the full story of a relationship — what was said, what was promised, what happened next — reads in order without you having to piece it together from separate tools.

Note: Notes can also be attached to opportunities and to company records, not just contacts, which matters if you're tracking a deal or an organization separately from the individual person.

#Tasks: what needs to happen next

Tasks are action items tied to a contact — "call back Thursday," "send the proposal," "follow up after the trial ends." A task can be assigned to yourself or a teammate, given a due date, and marked complete once it's done. Because tasks can also link to opportunities, companies, and other records (not just the one contact), a single task can represent "I need to follow up on this deal," and everyone working the account sees it in the same place.

Screenshot coming soon

The Tasks tab in the right panel showing an open task with a due date and assignee

#Communication preferences and Do Not Disturb (DND)

Not every contact wants to hear from you on every channel. The DND setting on a contact record controls whether outbound email, SMS, calls, or other channels are allowed to that person — separately, per channel. DND can be turned on manually (someone asked to be removed from texts, for instance), or it can be set automatically, such as when an email bounces or a contact replies STOP to a text.

DND is directional: outbound DND stops you from messaging the contact; it doesn't affect whether they can still message you. Respecting DND isn't optional — it's how you stay compliant with anti-spam and telemarketing rules, and smart lists and bulk sends both honor it automatically by excluding DND contacts from the channels they've opted out of.

#The activity timeline

The center panel's timeline is the closest thing to a full history of the relationship: every message sent and received, every call logged, every note added, every appointment booked, in the order it happened. When a contact calls in confused about something, the timeline is usually the fastest way to see what they've already been told.

#What "done" looks like

You should be able to open any contact and immediately answer: what do we know about this person (fields), what's their status (tags), what's the internal context (notes), what needs to happen next (tasks), and are we even allowed to message them (DND). If any of those feel unclear on a contact you're looking at, that's a sign the record needs cleanup before you build automation on top of it.

#Related articles

• Add and import contacts
• Organize contacts with tags, notes, tasks, and communication preferences
• What smart lists are and how filters work

#Frequently asked questions

#Can I add my own fields to the contact record?

Yes — custom fields let you store any data specific to your business, and once created they're available to every form, workflow, and smart list in the account.

#Do tags trigger automations by themselves?

Yes, if you've built a workflow that listens for a tag being added or removed. The tag change itself is the trigger; no other action is needed.

#If a contact has DND turned on, will they still show up in my contact list?

Yes. DND stops you from messaging them on the restricted channel — it doesn't hide or delete the record. They'll still appear in smart lists and reports; bulk sends will just skip them for that channel.