Person
A person is one human in a workspace's relationships — a single record however many addresses, numbers and channels they reach you on. Every conversation resolves to a person through an identity, and it is the person that carries history, memory and lifecycle stage.
One human, many ways of reaching you#
The record exists so that the same human writing from a work address, replying from a personal one and then telephoning is one history rather than three. The addresses and numbers are identities attached to the person; the person is what memory hangs from, what a relationship is with, and what Customer 360 assembles.
Resolution happens on the way in. A message arrives at a mailbox, its sender address is matched to an identity, and the identity names a person; when nothing matches, a person is created rather than the message being left ownerless. That is why an unfamiliar correspondent still gets a record — and why duplicates accumulate and need merging.
Duplicates, and merging them#
Two records for one human is the normal failure here, not an exotic one. It happens whenever someone reaches you a new way before you knew the way was theirs: a mobile number with no name attached, a personal address on a holiday reply, a form filled in with a typo.
Find the pair on the relationships screen — duplicates are surfaced rather than left for you to notice.
Result You can compare what each record actually holds before deciding.
Merge them.
Result The identities collect on one person and the history stops being split; conversations keep their own channel records.
Check the memory afterwards.
Result Memory scoped to a contact belonged to one of the two records, and a merge is the moment to notice a note that was only ever on the quieter half.
Telling a new prospect from an existing customer covers the harder version of the same problem, where research turns up someone you are already talking to.
Four records that are not a person#
- An identity
- One address on one channel. A person has several; an identity belongs to exactly one person. When you want to say *where the message came from*, you mean an identity.
- A company
- The organisation. A person may belong to one, may change to another, and the company's history is not the person's.
- A prospect
- Someone research found who is not yet a relationship. The point at which a prospect becomes a person you are dealing with is a real transition, not a rename.
- A user of your workspace
- A colleague who signs in. Sign-in is Google OAuth and belongs to platform identity, outside the workspace's records entirely — your colleague is not a row on the relationships screen by virtue of having an account.
That last one bites in an unexpected way: because sign-in identity sits outside the workspace, a colleague who also writes to you from their own address can legitimately exist as a person *and* as a workspace member, and the two records know nothing about each other.
Questions#
What happens when someone writes from an address I have never seen?
It becomes a new identity. If nothing links it to an existing person, a new person is created — which is correct, and is why duplicate merging exists rather than guesswork at the door.
Does a person carry their own memory?
Yes, at the contact tier, which is the narrowest and therefore wins over channel and workspace entries. A block on a person is held there too.
If someone changes employer, do I lose the history?
No. The person is the record; the company they are attached to is a separate one, and changing it does not detach the conversations you have had with them.