Customers, consent and contacts

Everyone who writes to you becomes a contact by themselves, with the name they use on WhatsApp. Contacts lists them all, with three numbers at the top: Total, Marketing consent (who can receive campaigns) and Opted out (excluded automatically).

Filter by Everyone, Consented, No consent or Opted out, and open anyone to see their details, their consent history and their conversations.

How many contacts a workspace can hold depends on the plan: Solo 500, Starter 2,000, Growth 25,000 and Scale 200,000. The limit applies to lists you bring (imports and your own systems), never to customers who write to you.

Owners, admins and managers can bring in a list from a spreadsheet:

1. Save the spreadsheet as CSV. It needs a phone column; it may also have name, email and tags. Numbers without a country code are read as your workspace’s country, so 0712 345 678 works.
2. In Contacts, choose Import from a spreadsheet and pick the file.
3. Sema shows what it found before anything is saved: Ready to import, Duplicates merged, and Cannot be used (with why).
4. Tick These people agreed to receive messages from us. only if they did (see below), and press Import ….

Someone who ever opted out is never brought back by an import, whatever the spreadsheet says.

WhatsApp allows marketing messages only to people who agreed to hear from you, and Kenya’s Data Protection Act asks you to be able to show when and how they agreed. Sema records it for each contact, with where it came from:

• an import, with the box ticked;
• your own system, which must say where the consent came from;
• the customer replying with a word such as START.

Campaigns go only to people who agreed, unless you deliberately choose otherwise for a campaign. Replying to someone inside their open conversation never needs consent: they wrote to you.

When a customer sends one of these words, in English or Kiswahili, Sema stops all campaigns and templates to them at once and replies to confirm:

STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, REVOKE, OPTOUT, OPT OUT, OPT-OUT, REMOVE, ACHA, SITISHA, SIMAMISHA, TOKA, ONDOA.

They get: “You will not get any more messages from us. Reply START if you change your mind.” Sending START, UNSTOP, SUBSCRIBE, RESUME, ANZA, ENDELEA or RUDISHA turns messages back on.

You can still answer them inside a conversation they start. If someone asks you to stop in another way (on a call, at the counter), open their contact and press Record an opt-out. If they later ask to hear from you again, Record that they opted back in; only do that when they actually asked.

On a contact’s page, Details holds their name, email, tags and any custom fields, saved with Save details. Tags are separated by commas (“wholesale, Kileleshwa”), and campaigns can be sent to a tag, or leave one out.

The name you set is the one your team sees; WhatsApp’s own name for them is kept as well, and never overwrites yours.

Contacts → Tags lists every tag you use, how many contacts carry it, and whether a saved audience, a campaign not yet sent or a Google Sheet uses it. Who shows the contacts with that tag.

Owners, admins and managers can change a tag for everyone at once. Rename changes it on every contact, in your saved audiences and in campaigns not yet sent, so they still reach the same people. Renaming “vip” to “VIP” when you already have “VIP” makes the two one tag. A colour makes a tag easy to spot in the inbox and on contacts.

Remove takes a tag off every contact. While an audience, a campaign or a sheet still uses the tag, Sema says which one, so nothing reaches more people than you meant.

Under Kenya’s Data Protection Act your customers can ask what you hold about them, and ask you to delete it. On their contact page, under Their rights:

• Download their data: everything held about them, as a file you can send them.
• Erase permanently: owners, admins and managers only. Their messages and details are removed and cannot be brought back; their number stays on the suppression list so they are never messaged or imported again. See erasing one customer.