Creating contact lists

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]welcome to leades my name is Rob Edwards in this video we're going to be taking a look at one of the fundamental aspects of any leades environment your contact lists while your projects may be the engine which drives the activity within leades your contact lists are the fuel and just like any engine if you want the best performance from it you need to feed it the best fuel now of course a lot of what makes a good contact list happens long before it hits lead desk where you sourced these contacts from what checking have you done on the validity of the information in it all of these things are outside of our control in leades but there are some things that we can do with contact lists in leades which will help that efficiency in this video we're going to be taking a look at a few of those so as well as creating the contact lists we're going to look at how we set our calling rules how we can filter our contact list to make sure the duplicates aren't an issue for it and a few other specific details which can be used to fine-tune what your contacts lists look like and how they behave let's get into the application so as you would expect the contact list can be found in the contact list page and within that your lists are stored in the contact lists sub page click the create button and that will take you into the create contact list page now before we actually go ahead and create any new contact lists I'd like to draw your attention to this option in the import contact list section leades has a default expectation of what a contact list looks like uh the way it is laid out and while it is not essential that your contact list that you have matches that format precisely if you haven't yet committed to a long contact list in some other format you may want to download the standard lead desk template from here to doing so uh will let you then manage your contacts into the format lead desk is expecting and it will all go a little bit smoother but it is not mandatory as long as your contact lists files are in CSV or Exel format with a maximum of 10 megabytes we should be able to import them into lead desk and handle any mismatch of fields when that happens let us say that we have our contact list waiting in a CSV or Excel file and we're ready to upload it so the first thing we need to do is decide whether we are creating a brand new contact list here or adding contacts to an existing contact list the example I'm going to use today is going to be creating a brand new one so we'll just leave this option selected here the next thing we need to do is find a name for our contact list and this is one of those things which it's easy to overlook the importance of it's easy to go oh January contact list actually naming your contact list is hugely important later on when we're trying to use them so we know what the intent behind this contact list was for so if you have a contact list which is specifically about selling one of your products maybe contact sales for that product would be a good name make it meaningful make it something that you will understand when you come across it later on and try and work out what that contact list was for it's really important so I'm creating a contact list here called onboarding contact list because this is a video about onboarding we can give it a legend which is to say a descriptor so we can explain what this contact list is for it's actually a really useful thing again once you've been using a contact list for a while to be able to come back and see what it was about I'm going to skip it for now but I would actually recommend generally for your contact list that you do put some sort of description in the legend field if you are creating a lead disk environment which is going to be supporting multiple offices from multiple sponsor the next two fields are really important because we can Define which office this contact list is in use by and which sponsor is in control of this contact list these are things we haven't talked about in the onboarding videos yet so I am for today anyway going to skip them the next set of rules which are ones we do need to think about are all about making sure that we comply with local legislation about what we're allowed to do when calling people so it may well be that in your region you are only allowed to call a particular customer three times before it starts being considered to be a nuisance call so in that case we want to make sure that we limit the number of call attempts per number to three in your region that number might be different it might be five calls it might only be two so bear that in mind and use this setting to control how many attempts leades will make to call a particular number or a particular contact as the contact list gets older the information in it becomes less current people change phones move jobs move houses so the data you're going to have in your contact list is going to become less and less valid and the more invalid data you have in your contact list the less efficient it's going to be choosing an expiry date which puts it in use for long enough to get the best out of it but it doesn't start getting stale again you need to make that decision for yourself I'm going to choose six mon months for me so that is going to be August of 2024 uh that I am going to continue until let's say the end of August likewise the calling time here is not manager you don't have to set anything in here but I know that in some countries there are laws about what time of day you can call as a business call for a cold call anyway so for that type of region we need to think about what times of day is valid to be making calls and maybe in the region that you work in you're only allowed to call between 10 and 3 so we can put that restriction on this contact list and it may seem counterproductive be restricting your contact list but the last thing you want is to have your phone number become identified as a nuisance caller because then all of these things which automatically block nuisance callers are going to start blocking your calls and that makes your content list less efficient so really important that we abide by the rules in your region if you want to be able to keep your contact list as efficient as possible I have a file so I'm going to click on choose file it's an Excel file that I have call contact list for onboarding by default leades will automatically format phone numbers that it finds in your contact list you're uploading into a standard format generally speaking that is the best choice it will make it easier to match for blacklisting it will make it easier to find duplicates generally speaking you want to make sure that we have the automatic phone number formatting enabled so don't tick that box but if you have a particular reason that you need to disable it then you can likewise leades has standard name formats that it uses and again this is about recognizing duplicates recognizing things which are in blacklists and again you probably best not to tick this option but if you have a reason you want your names to remain in the exact format they are in your database then by all means tick this box the order of your contact list doesn't generally matter uh it is going to be calling all those numbers in that contact list eventually if you have uploaded the contact list with the ones that you want to call first first then by all means click to tick the box for keeping the list in order but generally in most use cases that's not going to be very important and while you can create a new Project based on this contact list I personally always prefer to not do that and manually set up the project so that I know my settings for it are correct the final section here is about filtering this list the first thing it does the first check that it does is to see if there are any duplicate phone numbers duplicate contacts within this contact list and if there are by default it will remove those duplicates so you don't call the same contact more times than the rule we set up above about how many times we're allowed to call that contact but again if you want to leave duplicates in there then you can uncheck this box it's also entirely possible to set up blacklists which contain numbers which should not be called for some reason uh and if you do have those numbers those blacklisted numbers in a contact list you're uploading that it can remove any blacklisted numbers so you never try and call them if you are creating a contact list which is going to be all about outbound calling then there's very little need for having contacts without phone numbers in them alternatively if you're creating a contact list for a customer service type environment then you could tick this box if that's what you want to be able to do when we were looking at duplicates earlier it is looking specifically at in my case my content Miss from boarding XL far that I'm uploading if I have other existing contact lists on my leisk environment and I want to check for duplicates against those as well that's what this bottom option is here when I am happy with all these settings I can click the create button if we had used the default lead desk template when we created our contact list we would be done now it would be finished already but in my case I didn't I chose to have a contact list uh which doesn't match the field names that we have in lead desk that they have in my Excel file so what we're doing now is matching the details that I have in my Excel file to the details that lead desk is expecting now it's been able to work out some of these already I have a field in my Excel file called email so it has got the lead desk email and it's matched that and that seems to be perfectly sensible but I have some other fields here which don't match the same field names that leades is expecting but it doesn't mean they're wrong for example my Excel file has forame and surname instead of first name and last name so if I want to say okay whenever you see a forame match it to the first name you can just drag it across like so and likewise surname to last name and in fact my location is the city field the last field I've got to match is my telephone number and that can go into phone number but it could also go into phone number 2 three and four down here as well so if you have multiple phone office number and and a mobile number or a home number and a mobile number you need to think about which one is going to be the primary phone number for a contact now I actually only have one telephone number in my contact list so that's an easy choice I just stick that one in against the phone number but if you had office number and mobile number then you might want to think about which of those matches the primary phone number field within lead desk as well as the standard demographic details that I've got uh matched up here notice that leades does have a whole host of other info Fields so if your contact list contains things like um subscription number or products owned or any kind of other additional details which are not part of the standard demographic range you can match those with other info fields and that will mean that they show up in the contact card when agents are looking at these contacts and calling them which can be a really useful thing to be able to do once you've matched all of your Fields including your other info Fields scroll to the bottom and click the create contact list button my contact list is relatively small so it will finish pretty much instantly uh so there we go it's already ready but if you are uploading a contact list with a you know 10,000 phone numbers in it it will take a little bit longer to process it it has successfully added eight contacts because that's how many there are in my file uh is suggesting two of them have no valid phone number but none of the contacts we had matched any of our blacklisted ones so they all got uploaded and likewise none of them were filtered out for being duplicates uh this section up here the contact list creation by the way uh stays on the screen uh but I can get rid of it once I have looked to that information by clicking on the hide here uh and that will just put it into my regular list of contact lists and you can see it's got a yellow star because it's relatively recently created that yellow star will eventually go away so that is how we create contact lists uh in later videos we'll have a look at how we attach those to a project and then we'll have a look at how the agent goes about calling the contacts in this contact list to sum up today we looked at the importance of contact lists we looked at how we can create them in lead desk how we can check for duplicates how we can set rules with make sure that we don't full foul of uh laws around nuisance calling and how we can set an end date on the contact list to make sure we don't we're not still using it uh when the information in it has gone stale I hope that was useful thanks for watching