Manage shared phonebooks

Shared phonebooks put your customers and suppliers in everyone's search results, and show a name instead of a number on incoming calls.

Shared phonebooks put your customers and suppliers in everyone's search results, and show a name instead of a number on incoming calls.

Why it is worth doing

A number that matches a phonebook entry arrives with a name attached. Colleagues can search for a company instead of remembering a number, and calls get answered with more context. It is one of the cheapest improvements you can make to daily call handling.

Create a phonebook

1. In WMS, go to Users > Phonebooks.
2. Click + and give it a name, such as customers or suppliers.
3. Save.

Making it appear for people is a separate step, and it is done per person rather than on the phonebook itself. Under Users, select somebody, open Edit preferences and then Phonebooks: move the books they should have from Available to Selected. Only what is in Selected shows up for them.

That is why a new phonebook can look broken. It exists, it has contacts in it, and nobody sees it because nobody has been given it yet. Select several people at once rather than working through them one at a time.

Add contacts

Add entries one at a time, or import a list in bulk if you are starting from a spreadsheet or an export from another system. Include the country code on every number, otherwise incoming calls will not match and you lose the name lookup that made this worth doing.

Keeping it current

A shared phonebook rots quietly. Nobody notices a wrong number until someone calls it. Give one person responsibility for each phonebook and review it a couple of times a year.

If your contacts live in a CRM, an integration keeps them in sync automatically and is a better answer than maintaining the list by hand.

Personal versus shared

Colleagues keep their own personal contacts separately, and those stay private. Shared phonebooks are for numbers the whole company benefits from.

See also

• Import users and contacts
• Set up the HubSpot integration for x-bees and Collaboration 7