If your customers file already holds an email address for each customer, Kolleno can turn that column into a contact on each customer. The contact is kept in sync with your file every time a customers file is imported, so you do not need to send the same address again in a contacts file.
This article covers the CSV connector via SFTP. For the format of the customers file itself, see Data for Kolleno CSV Connector via SFTP.
How it works
For each email column you choose, Kolleno keeps one contact per customer.
The contact belongs to the customer, not to the email address. When the address changes in your file, the same contact is updated rather than a new one being added.
Customers that share an email address each get their own contact.
A cell can hold several addresses separated by commas or semicolons. They all go on the same contact, and any invalid address is dropped.
If the cell is blank or holds no valid address, the contact's email is cleared and the contact is marked inactive. When a valid address appears again, the same contact is reactivated.
A customer with no email address in the file gets no contact until one appears.
Set it up
1. Add the column to your customers file. Use any column name that follows the usual rules (lowercase, no spaces), for example billing_email. You can add more than one email column, such as billing_email and statements_email, and each one becomes its own contact.
2. Ask us to switch it on. Contact our support team or your Customer Success Manager with these details for each column:
Setting | What it controls | Example |
Column | The column in your customers file that holds the email address. | billing_email |
Contact name | The name shown on the contact. Put a customers file column in curly braces to fill it in for each customer, or use fixed text. Names longer than 100 characters are shortened. | {name} gives each contact its customer's name. Accounts Payable gives every contact the same name. |
Primary | Whether the contact is the customer's primary contact. | Yes or No |
3. Send your next customers file. The contacts are created when it is imported. If your customers file always includes every customer, we can also re-process your latest file so existing customers get their contacts right away.
Example
With the column billing_email, the contact name {name} and Primary set to Yes, this customers file:
id | name | currency_iso | billing_email |
C001 | Acme Inc | USD | |
C002 | Globex | USD | |
C003 | Initech | USD | (blank) |
gives these contacts:
Customer | Contact name | Email address | Status |
Acme Inc | Acme Inc | Active, primary | |
Globex | Globex | Active, primary | |
Initech | None | None | No contact yet, as the file has no email address for it |
If a later file changes Acme's billing_email to finance@acme.com, the existing Acme Inc contact is updated to the new address. If the cell is left blank, that contact is marked inactive.
Good to know
Your file is the source of truth for these contacts. Their name, email address, primary status and active status are updated from your customers file on every import, so changes made to them in Kolleno are overwritten. To change one of these contacts, change your file.
Only customers in the file being imported are updated. Customers left out of a file keep their contacts as they are.
These contacts are separate from the ones in your contacts file, which keeps working as before. If you send the same address in both files, the customer ends up with two contacts for it, so send each address one way only.
If you stop sending a configured column, or rename it, its contacts are marked inactive at the next import. Let us know before renaming a column so we can update the setting.
If we remove a column from the setting, the contacts it created stay as they are.