Contacts

A contact is a person at one of your accounts. Contacts arrive from your connected platforms, from the email threads Zudo reads, and from meeting attendee lists — and they are how Zudo answers the question behind most churn: is anyone still talking to us? To see everyone at once, open the Contacts list from the Contacts tab on the Accounts page: filter by role, Owner, product traits and the account each person is on, save the result as a view, and give roles to many people at once.

Where contacts come from

Contacts are matched on email address, so the same person arriving from two sources stays one contact rather than becoming two.

Last seen

Each contact carries a last seen date — the most recent time Zudo saw evidence of them: an email, a meeting, or a product event. This matters more than it looks. The newest last-seen date across an account’s contacts becomes that account’s contact activity, which is one of the factors in its health score. An account where every contact went quiet three months ago scores worse than one where someone replied yesterday, without anyone having to notice and log it. You can override the date on an account directly — see health score configuration for when that is the right move.

Contacts on an account

The Contacts tab on an account, beside Activity, lists its contacts with their roles, email, last-seen date, latest NPS answer, and any traits their source supplied, with the account’s Owner first. The contact count in the account’s header opens it too. From there you can:

• Open someone by clicking their name: every account they’re on, the roles they hold on each, and their NPS answers and traits
• Add a contact manually, when someone joins the account mid-relationship. From any other page, press ⌘/ (Ctrl+/ on Windows) and then C for quick create, and choose the account
• Remove a contact from an account when they leave, without deleting the person record
• See their product traits — anything a product event carried about that individual, as opposed to the account

With Broadcasts turned on for you, anyone a broadcast won’t reach has a label beside their name: Unsubscribed, Bounced, Marked as spam or Suppressed in Postmark.

The account’s Owner

Each account can name an Owner: the contact who owns the account at the customer, the way the CSM owns it on your team. It is the person to tell about a pricing change, a renewal or an outage. With Vitally connected, each account’s Owner comes from the owner Vitally names, unless someone in Zudo chose one. A role your team picks can fill in the rest. To set it, hover over the contact on the account’s Contacts tab and choose Make Owner (the star). Choose it again to remove them. The Owner is listed first, with an Owner label, and the tab says when the account has none yet. Anyone in your organization can change it.

• An account has at most one Owner, and it is always one of the account’s own contacts.
• Removing the Owner from the account clears it. Merging two copies of the same person keeps it.
• A parent account lists the contacts of the accounts inside it, labeled with the account each one owns. Set each account’s Owner on that account’s own page.

To find accounts with no Owner, filter the Accounts list by Owner → No Owner.

Contact roles

Beyond the Owner, your team can give contacts roles of its own, such as Champion, Billing contact or Executive sponsor. An admin sets up the list in Settings → Organization → Contacts. To give someone a role, hover over them on the account’s Contacts tab, choose Edit roles (the tag), tick the roles they hold on this account, and save. Their roles show under their name.

• A role is held on an account, so someone on two accounts can be the champion of one and only a user of the other.
• A contact can hold several roles on one account, and several people can hold the same role.
• Removing someone from an account removes their roles there. Merging two copies of the same person keeps every role either held.
• On a parent account, each role says which account inside it it’s held on. Set roles on that account’s own page.

Roles given by a rule

A role can be given automatically, from what your product tells Zudo about each person: the traits in the identify calls Segment, PostHog or zudo.js send. For example, give Product owner to everyone your product marks with owner set to true. An admin sets the rule with Rule on the role in Settings → Organization → Contacts. Preview says how many people match and what saving would change before anything does.

• The rule gives the role on every account the person is on, and takes it away when their traits stop matching. Zudo checks again whenever new traits arrive.
• A role someone gave by hand is never touched by a rule.
• On the Contacts tab a role the rule gave shows as ticked in Edit roles, and can’t be unticked while the rule still matches. To change who holds it, change the rule.

Naming the Owner from a role

One role can also name the account’s Owner: tick When an account has no Owner, make the one person holding this role its Owner in its rule. Where exactly one person on an account holds that role, they become the Owner. Where several do, nobody is picked. It comes last: an Owner someone chose, or one Vitally names, always stays. It’s useful after leaving Vitally, or for accounts Vitally doesn’t know.

Contacts and the API

Contacts are fully available over the API and MCP: list and filter them, create them, and update a contact’s last-seen date. Each contact says which of its accounts it is the Owner of and which roles it holds on each. isOwner=true lists only Owners, contactRoleId lists the people who hold a role, and an account’s Owner is set with ownerContactId when you update the account. List your roles with GET /contact-roles, and set someone’s roles on an account with PUT /accounts/{accountId}/contacts/{contactId}/roles. Updating last seen is the one write that changes a health score, so it is the one worth wiring into an integration if your product knows about activity Zudo cannot see.