Guides

Let staff find a customer

Let staff in your app search your customers by name or email and put a record under one, without customers ever seeing each other.

Staff often need to start a job for a customer. lookupCustomers() searches your contacts by name or email, for the roles you allow in that app.

#Allow it

It is off until you name the roles, per app:

Let staff in the Brightwater portal look up customers.

Claude uses awesomate_crm_apps (customer_lookup). You can also set it on the app's page, under Who can look up customers. The app's default role, the one customers sign in with, can never be allowed: customers would see each other.

#Search, then link

const matches = await app.lookupCustomers({ q: 'jo', limit: 10 }); // two characters or more
// [{ id, name, email, phone }]

const jobId = await app.write('job', { title: 'Blocked gutters', status: 'open' }, {
  links: { customer: matches[0].id },
});

• Results are name, email and phone, at most 50. A field you marked sensitive comes back null.
• Look people up again by id with { ids: [...] } (up to 50), for example to show who a job is for.
• For the roles you allow, a write may link to any of your contacts, still inside the role's write rule for the kind.
• Any other role gets a forbidden error.