A contact is a final user that interacted or will interact with the RapidPro. The communication with the contacts happens through a channel.

A contact can:

• Be created in the Contacts guide;
• Be generate automatically when a new number communicates with your account through a channel;
• Or imported to your account through a spreadsheet XLS.

On the Contacts guide, you can:

• See, add, edit or delete the contact’s attributes;
• Organize your contacts in groups;
• Visualize the message background of each contact and see if it has some scheduled to send messages.
• Add, edit and prioritize the addresses.

Contact Fields: For each contact is attributed attributes that are called contact fields. They have values with your name, phone number and any individual information that you want to include. The contact fields are divided into two categories, standard and personalized fields, and they can get three types of value: text, numerical or date and time.

Default Fields: Includes the name, contact and group addresses.

Contacts Addresses: Each contact has an address, or URN, where the account messages are sent. The contact addresses are a kind of standard field, like Name and Groups. Addresses represent the ways that you can connect with their contacts. The most common type of address is phone number, although contact can have a Twitter, Telegram, email address and any external identification that you want to add. To each contact can attribute various addresses with the same type, in other ways, you can attribute different phone numbers to a unique contact. A contact address can be prioritized, so they will be organized using the priority order in the contact profile page.

Besides this, the prioritized address will appear in the contacts page.

Making reference to a contact in the flow

There are two ways to make a reference to the contacts fields into the flow:

@contact- reference the contact that is receiving the message. On most of the cases, this is an active contact. When you use “Send a Message to Someone”, @contact refer to the contact or group that the message is sent.

@Step.contact- reference the contact that sends the last message processed by the flow. In most cases, this is also an active contact. To use the “Send an SMS Response”, @step.contact and @contact are the same contacts. To use the “Send a Message to Someone”, @step.contact refer to the contact that received a message to the “Send a Message to Someone” into the flow, through triggers.

As the message created by “Send a Message to Someone Else” was sent to Nelson RapidPro, @contact.first_name will be replaced for Nelson. @step.contact.name and @step.contact.tel will be replaced for the user name and phone number that needs support.