In this article we explain how the contacts record works: what information it gathers, how to find somebody and what you can do from there.
A contact is a person: a customer, somebody who asked once, or a traveller who went on a trip you organised. They all live in the same list.
You will find the list under Travel CRM, in the Contacts tab.
The list
Each row summarises one person: name and email, their status, whether they are a traveler, how many bookings they have, the total they have been worth and their last trip, with the dates.
Two columns deserve an explanation:
Status tells a Lead from a Customer. A lead is somebody who has shown interest, and becomes a customer automatically as soon as a booking is made in their name. You do not have to change it by hand: marking an opportunity as won is not enough, it is the booking that converts them.
Traveler means that person has travelled with you. It is independent of the status: somebody can be a traveler without being your customer yet, if they travelled inside somebody else's booking.
The Total adds up only what you have closed successfully, not what you have under negotiation. To see that, open the contact's record: you will find it in the Pipeline card.
At the top you have the search box, the Filters and Export, which downloads the list exactly as you are looking at it — with the filters applied — handy for working the data in a spreadsheet.
Create a contact
Click Add contact. The minimum is first name, last name and email.
You do not need to create contacts by hand one at a time: when somebody fills in the form on a proposal, or when you create an opportunity with a new contact, it is created on its own.
The contact record
Click any row to open it.
At the top right you have three shortcuts: WhatsApp, Email and New opportunity, so you do not have to leave the record to do the most common things.
Below the name there are two figures worth not confusing:
Total — what that person has been worth in closed and won sales. If you have not closed anything with them yet, you will see Nothing closed yet.
Pipeline — what you have under negotiation with them right now, and how many open opportunities that is. If there are none, you will see No opportunities.
A long-standing customer can have a high Total and an empty Pipeline: they have bought a lot, but they have nothing in motion at the moment. That is exactly the signal to call them.
The side column holds their details, in three sections:
Contact — first name, last name, email, mobile, country, since when they have been a contact, and the Status and Traveler chips.
Billing — tax ID, company and address, for when you have to issue an invoice.
My fields — your custom fields, if you have created any.
The history
The main area has six tabs. The first one, Activity, is the one you will use most: it gathers everything that has happened with that person in chronological order.
There you will see when the contact was created, the notes the team has left along the way, and the stage changes of their opportunities — with the opportunity name as a link, so you can jump straight to it. Also the bookings and the payments, when there are any.
The other five tabs are specific views of the same thing: Notes for writing and editing, Emails for the correspondence if you have a mailbox connected, and Bookings, Payments and Opportunities for the detail of each one.
We recommend leaning on the notes more than seems necessary. A "prefers small hotels" or a "always travels off-season because of work" written today is what lets anybody on the team, a year from now, look after that customer as if they knew them.
Now that you know the contacts record, you can move on to: