IVR Node: Contact Lookup

The Contact lookup node (ContactLookup type) searches your workspace's contact list for the person calling, matching by the caller's phone number. If it finds a match, it stores their details in variables you can use in later nodes (Condition, Branch, personalized prompts). It needs no configuration at all — just drop it into the flow wherever you want the lookup to happen.

How it works

The node normalizes the caller's number to E.164 format and also tries a few variants (with and without +, digits-only) to maximize matches against whatever is stored in the contact's phone field, within the same workspace as the channel.

Outputs

• found: a matching contact was found. The variables contact.id, contact.name, contact.email, contact.tags (a list of tags), and contact.is_new = false become available.
• not_found: no contact matched that number. contact.is_new is set to true.

Example

You place Contact lookup right after the opening greeting. You wire the found output to a Condition with the expression contact.tags includes 'vip' to prioritize customers tagged VIP; you wire not_found straight to the main menu, since it's likely a new caller who may need to register first.

Tips

• Place it early in the flow, before any node that references contact.* in its configuration (Condition, personalized messages, etc.) — if it hasn't run yet, those variables will be empty.
• The contact's phone field must actually be populated for this node to find a match; if your contacts get created without a phone number (say, only through a WhatsApp identifier), lookups will consistently fail.
• Pair it with the Conversation lookup node (if available on your plan) to also route to the same agent/team that handled this customer last time.

Troubleshooting

If a contact you know exists always falls into not_found, check that the number stored on their record is in a recognizable format (with or without +, with country code) — the node tries several variants but can't guess a number stored in a very different format from how the customer is calling.