Contacts

What the page does

Contacts (in the sidebar, route /customers) is where you manage the customers your team communicates with and their contact people. FixControl is not a CRM: this page exists so governed customer communication has a real recipient, with an auditable trail.

• The list shows every customer with a status filter (Active / Archived / All), a search box, and the number of contacts per customer. New customer creates one.
• The detail page lets you Rename a customer, Archive and Reactivate them, and add or edit contacts. Under Communications it shows the governed messages for that customer, each with its status (for example Awaiting approval, Sent, Send failed). When a supportdesk connector is configured, Sync to supportdesk pushes the customer there.

Contacts

A contact's e-mail address is its identifier. Addresses are normalised and unique within your workspace, so the same address can never belong to two contacts. Editing a contact overwrites its fields; archiving a contact means it is no longer used as a recipient.

Changing a contact's e-mail address has one important side effect: any pending communication approval that was requested for the old address is invalidated. See below.

Governed customer communication

By default, every outbound customer e-mail or reply drafted in FixControl is staged as a communication approval before it is sent. AI-drafted free text always requires a human decision. A narrow auto-send path exists only for pre-approved templates when an admin has explicitly raised the autonomy setting; it is off by default.

What that approval guarantees:

• Frozen content — the approval is bound to the exact recipient, subject and body at the moment it was requested. Editing the message afterwards, or changing the contact's e-mail address, invalidates the pending approval; the message has to be staged and approved again. An approval always covers exactly what the approver saw.
• Four-eyes, when your policy asks for it — two-person review is a setting in your communication policy, and it is off by default. When your communication policy requires four-eyes, the person who requested the send cannot approve their own message and a second person has to decide. Without it, the requester may decide themselves.
• One decision point — you can decide in Approvals, on the approval card in Slack or Microsoft Teams (with a linked chat identity that is allowed to decide), or through the link in the approval e-mail. All of these go through the same decision point and follow the same rules; there is no separate path around it.
• Honest sending — an approved message is sent through the mail provider configured under Settings → Outbound email (SMTP or Resend). Without a configured provider the send ends with status Send failed and a visible reason, never a fake "sent".

Every step — draft, policy check, approval request, decision, send or failure — is recorded in the audit log.

Creating customers

Customers can be created from three places, all through the same underlying flow:

• This page — New customer, with an optional first contact; add more contacts on the detail page.
• Slack — the /fixcontrol customer create slash command (name, optional contact and e-mail).
• Chat — when you ask chat to send an answer to a customer address that is not known yet, the customer and contact are created as part of staging the reply for approval. Asking Slack or Teams to link a customer to a ticket ("link customer info@acme.com to FIX-12") does the same after your confirm click: if the customer does not exist yet it is created together with the contact and linked to the issue. This also works on issues without a tracker link.

Duplicate control applies everywhere: a customer with the same normalised name, or a contact with the same e-mail address, is reported as a duplicate and never merged without telling you. When linking from chat, an existing customer name means the new contact is added to that existing customer.

FAQ

Can I approve a message from the customer detail page? No. The customer page shows the trail, not the decision buttons. Decide in Approvals, on the Slack or Teams approval card, or through the approval e-mail.

Who decides when four-eyes is off? Anyone with the right to decide on customer communication, including the person who requested the send. Ask your admin to switch on four-eyes in the communication policy if your team wants a second person on every message.

What happens when I archive a customer? The record and its history stay; the customer drops out of the active list. Reactivate any time from the detail page.

Related

• Approvals — where communication approvals are decided.
• Public API — let an internal service propose a customer e-mail for approval.