Making an Additional Contact the Primary Contact

Availability: all plans

Sometimes the person you should be reaching changes. A customer asks you to use their new email, a spouse becomes the main contact, or the number on file is no longer in use. Rather than retyping details, you can promote an additional contact to primary. ServiceVisit swaps the details, so what was primary moves down into the list of other contacts and nothing is lost.

Before you start

You need permission to edit customers. The Edit Customer button on the customer's page is your sign that you have it.
The customer must already have the contact you want to promote. Add it first if it is not there.
Decide whether the contact is a different person. A contact with a name of its own is treated as a different person, and that changes the customer's name (see below).

Steps

Open Customers and select the customer.
Select Edit Customer.
Find the contact you want in the card titled Other ways to reach them.
Select Make primary on that contact's row.
Check the Customer Information card at the top of the page. The new primary details are in Email Address and Phone Number, and the previous primary details now appear as a contact in the list below.

What the swap does

If the contact has an email, it becomes the customer's primary email. The old primary email becomes the contact's email.
If the contact has a phone, it becomes the customer's primary phone. The old primary phone becomes the contact's phone.
A contact with only an email changes only the email. A contact with only a phone changes only the phone.
Whether each address or number is verified travels with the value. A verified email stays verified after it becomes primary, and the old primary keeps its own status as a contact.
If the contact has a name that differs from the customer's name, the two names are swapped as well. The customer record then carries the promoted person's name, and the previous customer name moves onto the contact. A contact with no name, or the same name, leaves the customer name alone.
If the swap leaves the contact with neither an email nor a phone (for example the customer had no primary email before), the empty contact row is removed instead of kept.

The change is recorded in the customer's activity history as "Primary contact changed", with the new primary name and email or phone, and who made the change.

Tips

Promotion is reversible. Select Make primary on the previous primary, which is now in the list, to swap back.
Check the name after promoting a contact that has a name. It is easy to forget that promoting a spouse's details also changes who the record is named after.
Primary details are also what ServiceVisit uses when it has to pick one address, such as for estimates and recurring invoices, so promote before you send rather than after.

If something goes wrong

If the page shows "That contact could not be made primary.", reload the customer and try again. The contact may have been removed since you opened the page.
If the primary details did not change the way you expected, open the customer's activity history and read the "Primary contact changed" entry to see what was swapped.

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