Overview

Customer names in Zinng are determined based on whether the system already recognizes the customer. All customer interactions in Zinng are tied to phone numbers, with the exception of certain website chat widgets where phone number collection is not configured.

Name Precedence Rules

Known Phone Numbers

When a phone number is already in the system and has an assigned name, the existing name takes precedence. This means:

• If your organization has previously assigned a name to a phone number in the Zinng interface, that name will be used for all future interactions
• This applies to new appointment requests, AI voicemail calls, AI answering service calls, and SMS messages from that number

Additional Technical Details

• Field Storage: The name associated with a phone number is stored in the external_user_id field in the ConversationUser model. This ensures that the system retains the correct association between the phone number and its assigned name across various interactions.
• Full names are stored in the metadata[BrowserMetadataKeys.FULL_NAME] field.
• Fallback Mechanism: If no external_user_id is found, the system will fallback to metadata, specifically to the metadata[BrowserMetadataKeys.PHONE_NUMBER] key, which stores the phone number temporarily. This provides a secondary method to track the number in case the primary method is unavailable.
• Data Integrity: No two records in the database can have the same phone number (external_user_id) for the same team and user_type combination.

New Phone Numbers

For phone numbers not previously seen by the Zinng system, names are determined using the following methods:

Appointment Requests

• Uses the name entered in the appointment request form's name field

AI Answering Service & AI Voicemail

• Name is determined by AI analysis of the call transcript
• Note: The AI will do its best to determine the caller's name based on the information they provide, but this may not always result in proper names. Users can manually update the name in the Zinng interface where you can set the name for that phone number.

Interactive Appointment Booking