Your Customer Store

Every person who contacts your desk becomes a customer record. AB Support matches them on email address or phone number — whichever their channel gives it — so when they write in again, their earlier tickets are right there.

This is AB Support’s own customer store — not the AB Sales CRM. A support customer is someone who asked for help; it is not automatically a sales lead. The two products keep their own records so a company can run either one on its own. See what AB Support is.

Two identity keys, one per kind of channel

Which detail identifies the person depends on how they reached you. There is no sign-up and no password — the channel supplies the identity.

Channel	Matched on
Web chat, support email, web form	Email address
WhatsApp, SMS	Phone number

The same person on two kinds of channel starts as two records. Someone who emails you and later messages you on WhatsApp is matched by two different keys, so they first appear as two customers, each with part of their history. AB Support never joins them on a guess — a shared number or a typed email can belong to someone else — so merge them once you know it is one person.

How a customer record forms

You don’t create customers by hand. The first time a new email address or phone number reaches your desk, AB Support opens a record for that person and attaches the ticket to it. The next message from the same address or number lands on the same record.

New email or number writes in Customer record created Later tickets attach to the same customer

Merging two records for the same person

When you can tell two customers are the same person — the WhatsApp ticket is clearly from someone who emailed last week — merge them from any ticket of either one.

Open a ticket from one of the two records. Its Customer panel shows who it is from.
Click Same person as another customer? under the customer’s details.
Search for the other record by name, email or phone number, and click Choose beside the right one. A phone number matches however it was typed, so +44 7700 finds 447700900123.
Check which record is kept, then click Merge. The confirmation names both, so you can step Back if you picked the wrong one.

After a merge	What happens
Which record stays	The one you met first, so “first seen” stays true.
Tickets	All of them move to the record that stays. Each moved ticket’s history notes the merge.
Email and phone	The record that stays gains whichever it was missing, so later email and WhatsApp or SMS messages both land on it.
Messaging opt-out	If either record had opted out of SMS and WhatsApp, the merged customer stays opted out. Their consent history comes across too.
The other record	Kept in the background, not deleted, so nothing is lost — it just stops appearing as a separate customer.

There is no un-merge button. Merging joins two people’s histories, so be sure it is one person before you confirm. If you merge the wrong two, contact support rather than trying to split them yourself.

What’s on a customer

Field	Where it comes from
Name	What the person gave in chat, the form, their email “From” name, or their messaging profile.
Email	The identity key for web chat, email, and web forms.
Phone	The identity key for WhatsApp and SMS, stored in international format.
Ticket history	Every ticket this person has opened, across all of your channels.

Why history matters: when you open a ticket, you can see whether this is a first-time visitor or someone you’ve helped before — so you don’t ask them to repeat themselves. See how a ticket works.

The customer store lives inside your support desk — each desk has its own customers, just as it has its own tickets and settings.

Published on 2026-07-13

Last updated on 2026-10-01

Version 4

AB Support customers contacts history email phone WhatsApp SMS merge duplicate customers

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