A contact is a named external person or company with one or more phone numbers. The PBX matches incoming caller IDs against the contact list and surfaces the contact's name, company, and VIP status on the answering phone.
Overview
Contacts make the difference between "Anonymous caller" and "John Smith - Acme Corp" on the answering user's screen. They are an inbound-side feature: a contact needs at least one phone number to be matched, and beyond identification they drive two optional behaviors.
- Global block - reject all of a contact's inbound calls tenant-wide.
- Handling strategy - route a contact's calls to a specific destination instead of the called number's normal flow.
Contacts can be shared across the tenant, limited to chosen groups, or private to one user. Shared contacts require the manage global contacts permission. The list's Visible to column says which of the three a contact is, and the Visibility filter narrows the table to one of them.
Contacts imported from a connected Google account arrive private to the user whose account they came from. An account that holds the company phone book rather than one person's contacts can publish them instead, to everyone or to chosen groups: see who sees the contacts imported from an account. Imported contacts are read only for the fields Google supplies; everything Cockpit adds, such as notes, VIP and routing, stays editable here.
What it does
The handling strategy overrides routing when the contact calls in from outside (internal calls are unaffected).
| Strategy | When to use |
|---|---|
| Default | Identification only, no routing change. The standard case for almost all contacts. |
| Call flow | Multi-step routing for important contacts, for example a VIP greeting then a priority queue. |
| Extension | Send the contact straight to a specific desk regardless of the number they dialled. |
| User | VIP-to-account-manager routing. The user's phones, twinning, and DND rules apply. |
| SIP device | Route to a shared phone or kiosk not owned by one user. |
The VIP flag lets a contact bypass Do not disturb on the called user. It requires the user to also hold the VIP permission, granted by an administrator.
See also
- Phone numbers - the DIDs whose default routing the contact handling strategy overrides.
- Call flows - the routing destination for the Call flow handling strategy.
- Users - the VIP permission lives on the user receiving the call.
- Google Workspace integration - importing contacts from Google, and deciding who sees them.