Recall that each contact is assigned attributes, called contact fields, that hold values such as their names, phone numbers, and any other individual information you want to include. Contact fields are divided into two types, default fields and custom fields, and they can hold three types of values: text, numeric, or date & time.
Note that only date & time values can be used for custom contact fields within campaigns. See how to manually edit the field type of a custom contact field below.
Creating Custom Contact Fields Manually
You can easily create a customized contact field by navigating to the “Contacts” tab in your account. From there, click “Manage Fields”.
You’ll be brought to the Manage Contact Fields page:
Note that the manage field dialog is also another way to know how to refer to a field value in a message or flow, i.e. the field value for “Address” is @contact.address.
You can make a contact field appear at the top of your contact’s contact page by making it “[featured](/en/article/what-is-a-featured-contact-field-10ii68c/)”. Do this by clicking on the contact field and checking the “Featured field” box. You can also choose the field type, such as text, number, date & time, state, district, or ward.
Editing a Contact’s Custom Fields
Custom fields, while created via the “Manage Fields” button on the contacts tab, can be edited via the “Custom Fields” dialogue also located within each contact’s profile page. To access the custom dialogue, navigate to a contact’s profile page, click the ☰ menu icon, and select the “**Custom Fields**” option from the settings menu:
Creating a Custom Contact Field in a Flow
You can create new custom contact fields or update existing ones in a flow using the Update the Contact action. In the flow above, we’ve asked new contacts for their name. Once we collect that information in the Wait for Reply action, we’ll update the contact:
We’ll enter a value for this new field using @results.[fieldname]_, which we can use later in our flow to reference this field.
You can choose an already existing field to update or create a totally new field by simply typing the name of the field you’d like to make:
