Contacts — directory of people Wilow can route to

The Contacts page is the directory of people inside your business that Wilow can hand a visitor off to. When a visitor asks something like "who do I talk to about partnerships in Germany?", Wilow picks the right row from this list and surfaces a contact card with name, role, email, and phone.

Contacts pair with the handoff flow but aren't the same thing. Handoff sends a transcript to one operator email; contacts let the bot proactively suggest a specific person before any handoff happens.

When to add contacts

The minimum bar: you have people who own specific topics, and you'd rather Wilow say "talk to Maria, here's her email" than send everything through a generic handoff. Typical patterns:

  • A partnerships lead, a support lead, a sales lead.
  • Per-region account executives — one per country, one per language area.
  • Per-postcode field-service engineers — when region routing is on.

If you're a tiny operation with one inbox for everything, skip this page. The handoff flow covers you.

Adding a contact

  1. Admin → Catalog → Contacts.
  2. New contact.
  3. Fill in:
    • Name + Role (required) — "Maria Schmidt", "Head of Partnerships". The visitor sees both.
    • Email, Phone, URL — at least one is required so the bot has a channel to surface. Email and phone are visible to all visitors who see this contact's card; don't list a personal mobile you don't want public.
    • Location — free-text city/region. Helps the bot route by geography for unstructured queries ("anyone in Berlin?").
    • Specialties — short comma-separated list. The strongest routing signal. "partnerships, strategic accounts, Germany" lets Wilow pick this row for partnership questions in DE.
    • Postcode prefixes (when region routing is on) — list of prefixes that route to this contact. "10, 11, 12" matches Berlin postcodes 10xxx–12xxx.
    • When to show — free-text hint to the bot about when this contact is appropriate ("opening hours after 6pm", "tier 1 accounts only").
    • Image URL — optional headshot, link to your CDN. We don't host these.
  4. Active — flip off without deleting if you're seasonally rotating coverage.
  5. Save.

Region routing with postcodes

When postcode routing is on (the regionRouting feature):

  1. Add a postcode-prefix list per contact. Prefixes are matched as string prefixes — "10" matches "10115", "11" matches "11000–11999".
  2. Turn on Ask visitor for postcode on languages so the widget collects it.
  3. When a visitor reveals their postcode, Wilow picks the contact whose prefix list matches and surfaces that person.

Without region routing on, the postcode column doesn't show and the bot routes by specialties + location only.

What the visitor sees

A contact card in the chat: name, role, photo if you supplied one, and the channels you set as click-throughs. Email becomes a mailto: link, phone becomes a tel: link, and the URL (if you set one) becomes a "Profile" link pointing wherever you want. Set all three and all three surface; set one and only that one.

The bot can also reference a contact in plain prose without rendering a card — "you'd want to talk to Maria about partnerships" — when that fits the conversation flow better. You don't configure which; the bot picks per turn.

Contacts vs. handoff

  • Handoff — visitor explicitly asks for a human. Transcript is delivered to one operator email (and/or webhook). See handoff.
  • Contacts — Wilow proactively offers a specific person based on the question. Visitor reaches out themselves; no transcript is forwarded.

Use both. Contacts handle "who do I ask about X"; handoff handles "I want to talk to a human right now, get me out of the bot".

Common questions

  • How does the bot pick which contact to suggest? Specialties, location, postcode (if region routing is on), and the bot's read of the conversation. The "when to show" hint nudges it.
  • Can I require a postcode every conversation? Yes — turn on Ask visitor for postcode on languages.
  • My contacts are showing the wrong person. Tighten the specialties — they're the strongest signal. "partnerships" is too generic; "strategic-partnerships, enterprise, north-DACH" gives the bot something to discriminate on.
  • Region routing — is it just for Germany? No, postcode-prefix matching works for any country whose postcode is a number prefix (DE, US, UK with caveats). Free-text routing by location works regardless.
  • Can I show a contact only outside business hours? Use the when to show hint — "outside business hours". The bot reads it and behaves accordingly, but it isn't a hard cron-based gate.
  • The postcode field isn't there. That's the region-routing feature; it's not enabled on your workspace yet — contact us if you'd like it on.
  • Can I import contacts in bulk? Not from the UI today. Email us if you have a long list and we can do a one-off load.

See also handoff for the human-takeover path, catalog for products, and languages for the postcode-ask toggle.

Where to find us

Stuck? Email [email protected].