contacts Look up Contacts based on Email Address

[Jeremy]

Is there a way to look up contacts via their email address?

I know that you can Get Contact but it seems that you can only look up by either Contact ID or Logon ID however I am trying to get the Contact ID so that I can assign a request to that contact if they exist. The only thing that is a constant for us is the email address so ideally we want to be able to look up via this.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Jeremy

Nothing that I'm aware of.  Possibly not easy to implement if you already have a lot of contacts with their Login IDs set, however, one could set the Login ID as their email address.  

app.view.contact.disableEmailDuplicateValidation is an important setting when it comes to logging in using an email address.  You may want to also assure that this is off if you are going down that route.

 

[Jeremy]

Thanks @James Ainsworth I assume that if we change this is won't change the current contacts id therefore we are still in the same situation.

I guess that we will have to use an API call to check the contacts email address and return the relevant Contact ID for us to able to do this successfully.

[Steve Giller]

On 10/28/2022 at 12:19 PM, Jeremy said:

I am trying to get the Contact ID so that I can assign a request to that contact if they exist.

By this I'm assuming you mean make the Contact the Customer?

It would probably be useful to know how you're getting to the point where you have got the Request but not linked to the "correct" Customer so we can understand the setup a little more clearly.

[Jeremy]

@Steve Giller we have an external form that people can request help, via a current form stack form. This is mainly for people that can't login to our services including self service, so they complete this form, it gets emailed to us we then auto log this email. But as these people can't login their main account that we have in Hornbill, we are automatically creating contact for them based on their personal email address and name.

However some email address have been in contact with us before so we can't log this in the customers name as it errors if the email address has been used previously to create a contact, but we have no idea what this contact id is to log the log in their name.

[James Ainsworth]

@Jeremy

This automation will look up contact information based on Contact ID or Login ID.  So, if you have the email address, and the Login ID is the same as the email address, you can look up the details of a contact based on the Login ID.  One of those things it will return is the Contact ID. 

[Jeremy]

@James Ainsworth when I look up our contacts the 'Logon Id' is blank, is there a way to set this as their email address? We would like to do this for all existing contacts.

[James Ainsworth]

Hi @Jeremy

I would start by manually updating one of your contacts so that the Login ID is set to the same as their email and then test this to make sure that it will do what you want it to do.

There is a Contact Import tool that will let you both add and update your contacts.  You may be able to use this to update all the existing contacts to include the email as the Login ID.  Before doing this you will want to make sure that this will not affect any contact from logging in.  If there is an existing Login ID for any contact, they may be using this to login to the Customer Portal and changing it may mean that they are using the wrong ID to login.  Information about the Contact Import can be found here.