Articles on: Contacts

Searching for Contacts

In addition to searching for contacts by name or phone number, you can place queries in the search bar on your contacts tab or in the 'Start Flow' dialogue to search for contacts based on the values in their contact fields

Queries



The query you enter will operate on all contact fields present in your account. Note that fields and values are not case sensitive within a query. 



Operators



To find contacts that match a contact field search, use equal =  For example: hair = "blonde"  

For searches between two numbers, use greater than or equal to >= and less than or equal to <= Example: age >= "18" AND age <= "30" 

To search for not equal, use !=  Example: student_id != 001

Note that with contact fields containing two or more words, spaces need to be replaced with underscores, e.g. id_number = 409328

For names and URNs (phone numbers) you can use the ~ or has operator. This will search for a substring, e.g. tel ~ "779"

Statements



You can use OR statements to match two or more contact field values, and AND statements to filter contacts by contact field.

For example, city = "Oakland" or city = "Berkeley"  will return only those contacts whose 'City' contact field contains "Oakland" or "Berkeley", and (city="Oakland" and gender="Male" will return only those contacts whose 'City' contact field contains "Oakland" and whose "Gender" contact field contains "Male".

tel has "123" will return only those contacts whose phone number contains '123'.

name has "Be" will return only those contacts whose 'Name' field contains 'Be'.

Field Types



Text values containing multiple words must be enclosed in quotation marks, e.g.
city = "san francisco" , while operators like >=  only work with Numeric and Date & Time values.



Smart Groups



Groups resulting from queries are called Smart Groups. Smart groups, previously called "dynamic", are unique in that they will continue to collect contacts who match the query that created them.

Creating a Smart Group



Once you enter a query, the platform will return of contacts who match it: 

You can save this new group by clicking the Create Smart Group on the right hand side:



Once a smart group is saved, any new contacts that match the query will be automatically placed in it.

Updated on: 08/06/2023

Was this article helpful?

Share your feedback

Cancel

Thank you!