Contacts & Groups

Overview

Contacts is your workspace address book — every person you can message, with their name, phone number, email, language, groups, and an internal memo. Groups are the segments you sort contacts into (VIP customers, new signups, cart abandoners, and so on) so you can target broadcasts, WhatsApp campaigns, catalog sends, and flow enrolment at exactly the right audience.

Open it from the top navigation under Contacts. The page has a side rail of views and group filters, a four-tile stat row, and a searchable contacts table that switches between list and grid. A Groups view on the same page lists your groups with live member counts.

Shared by workspace: contacts and groups belong to the workspace, not to the person who created them. The only exception is older records imported before workspaces existed — those stay visible to their original owner until re-imported.

Prerequisites

Contacts has no external credentials — you can start adding people immediately. Two things govern how many you can hold and what you can do with them:

Plan limit: if your workspace is already at its contacts limit, adding or importing contacts is blocked until you upgrade or remove some. The check runs before a contact is created and before an import begins.

Adding a contact

1. Click Add contact (top right) to open the contact modal.
2. Fill in at least a first name and a mobile number (the only required fields).
3. Optionally set a country code, email, language, one or more groups, an address, an internal memo, and an avatar image.
4. Click save. The contact appears at the top of the table (newest first).

Field reference

How the display name is built: if you fill the full Name field it wins. Otherwise WaDesk joins whichever of title, first name, middle name, and last name are present, separated by spaces.

Importing contacts from CSV

Click Bulk upload to import a CSV file. WaDesk uses a two-step, preview-first flow so you never import blind.

Step by step

1. Choose a file. Pick a .csv file (max 5 MB).
2. Review the auto-mapping. WaDesk reads the header row, auto-detects which column maps to which field, and shows the first five data rows so you can confirm the mapping looks right.
3. Set "apply to all rows" defaults (optional). Choose a Status, a Source, a Group, and Tags to stamp onto every imported row (see the table below for how each is stored).
4. Import. Submit the file again. Each valid row becomes a contact and you get a summary: "Imported N contacts (M skipped)."

Column auto-detection

Header names are normalised before matching — lowercased with all non-alphanumeric characters stripped — so Phone Number, phone_number, and PHONE-NUMBER all resolve to the same field. The first header that matches a field wins. These are the exact recognised names:

How rows are processed

• A row is skipped if it has no name or no mobile. The skipped count is reported in the summary.
• On import, the imported name is stored as both the full name and the first name; map a last name column if you want surnames split out.
• A CSV Group column can name multiple groups, comma-separated. Each name is matched case-insensitively against existing workspace groups; any that doesn't exist yet is created for you, scoped to the workspace.
• The CSV's own group column takes precedence; the "apply to all rows" group is merged in as a fallback so contacts always land in at least that group.

What the "apply to all rows" knobs do

File requirements: CSV only, max 5 MB. Keep phone numbers in international format with the country code so messaging works straight away. Your contacts limit is checked before the import runs — a workspace already at the limit is blocked.

Groups (segments)

Groups are how you slice your audience. Click New group to create one.

1. Give the group a name (required).
2. Optionally add a note and pick a colour.
3. Save. The group appears in the left rail and in the Groups view with a live member count.

• Switch to the Groups view to see every group with its current member count.
• Editing a group lets you rename it, change its note, or change its colour.
• Deleting a group first removes it from every contact that's in it, then removes the group itself. The contacts are kept — they simply lose that one group.

Why groups matter: broadcasts, WhatsApp campaigns, catalog sends, and flow enrolment all target by group. Member counts are always calculated fresh, so they're accurate rather than out of date.

Searching, filtering & the stat row

The contacts table has its own controls:

• Search by name, email, or phone — filtering happens live as you type.
• Side-rail views: All contacts, Groups, Imported (contacts brought in via CSV), and No group (contacts not in any segment).
• Group filters: click any group in the left rail to show only its members.
• List / grid toggle switches the table between a dense list and a card grid.

The stat row at the top always shows four workspace-wide counts:

Editing and deleting

Each row has an edit icon (opens the contact in a modal) and a delete icon (asks to confirm). To remove several at once, tick the checkboxes and use Delete selected.

1. Edit: open the row, change any field, save. The same name-building and country-code-prepend rules from Adding a contact apply on update.
2. Single delete: click the delete icon and confirm.
3. Bulk delete: select rows and choose Delete selected.

Deletion is permanent. Both single and bulk deletes only affect your current workspace, so you can never delete a contact in another workspace. Deleting a contact removes them from this workspace's address book — it does not erase past conversation history in the inbox, but the contact will no longer appear in pickers, segments, or campaign audiences.

Troubleshooting