Creating a contact

Contacts are the people you want to send messages to. They can be your customers, your employees, or anyone else you want to send messages to, they will also be the receivers of broadcasts so it is important to set them up correctly. There are two ways of doing it: manually or by importing a CSV file. We’ll cover both methods in this guide.

Creating a contact manually

Go to your contacts and click on the “New Contact” button on the top right corner.

Then fill out the form with the contact’s information, the only required field is the phone number, the rest are optional but recommended.

Phone number must be formated using E.164 format, which is the international format for phone numbers. Its structure is +(Country code) (contact number including area code). For example, the phone number [phone] in E.164 format is written as [phone].

You can then add additional attributes by using the form below.

Once you’re happy click on Create.

Creating a contact by importing a CSV file

If you have a database of your contacts, they can be easily imported into Hilos by using a CSV file. For this go to your contacts and click on Upload CSV button on the top right corner.

Then click on Choose File and select the CSV file you want to import. Once you’ve selected the file click on Upload CSV.

Formatting your CSV

For this guide we’ll assume you are using Microsoft Excel, but the process is similar in other spreadsheet software.

To begin with open a new Excel Spreadsheet and add the following columns:

phone	first_name	last_name	email	external_url

Pay attention to the casing of the column names, they have to be exactly as shown above else the import will fail.

You can add any number of fields to the left, they will be taken as custom attributes.

Here’s an example of a CSV file with 3 contacts:

phone	first_name	last_name	email	external_url	favorite cat
[phone]	Bruce	Wayne	[e-mail]	https://hilos.com	Calico
[phone]	Oliva	Cat	[e-mail]	https://hilos.com	Panthers
[phone]	Rick	Astley	[e-mail]	https://hilos.com	Orange cats

Once the table is filled out, clic on File > Save As and save the file as a CSV file and upload it using the steps shown above.