Importing and Exporting Contacts

Information on how to import and export contracts into Chatti's online platform

Andrew Craig avatar
Written by Andrew Craig
Updated over a week ago

Chatti makes it easy to import contact information from a spreadsheet program like Excel, as well as to export contact information back into a spreadsheet. It's also possible for developers to import and export contacts via the REST API.

Importing Contacts from a Spreadsheet

From the Contacts page, click More > Import contacts.

Then, select and copy up to 1,000,000 rows from your spreadsheet (not including header rows), then paste them into Telerivet in your web browser. Alternatively, click "Upload file..." to upload an Excel or CSV file directly.

If you copied any custom contact fields, click "(Unknown)" in the header cell and identify each field. If any fields are incorrect, click the field name in the header cell to change it.

You also can import contacts into different groups by pasting a column containing a list of group names separated by commas (e.g. "subscribers, participants") and then identifying that as the "Groups" column.

If you have more than 1,000,000 contacts to import, you can import them in batches by repeating the process for every 1,000,000 contacts.

By default, the Phone Number is used as the lookup key, which means that if a contact already exists with the matching phone number, Chatti will update (overwrite) the existing contact information with the imported fields instead of creating a new contact. Any blank or missing fields in the imported rows will not be changed on the matching contact.

To change which field is used as the lookup key, click the current lookup key at the bottom of the spreadsheet. Your custom fields can also be used as the lookup key, for example if you have a Customer ID field. It is also possible to disable the lookup key, so that new contacts are always created, without updating existing contacts.

Exporting Contacts to a Spreadsheet

To export contacts to a CSV file, click More > Export contacts from the Contacts page, then select the columns you would like to export.

Note that Chatti formats phone numbers in the CSV file starting with a caret (e.g. ^16505550123) so that Excel displays them as text instead of a number in scientific notation. If you re-import contacts into Chatti, the caret will automatically be removed.

Importing and Exporting Contacts via the API

To learn how to use the Chatti via the Telerviet API to import or export contacts, visit the REST API documentation .

Exporting Contacts to Cloud Storage (Amazon S3)

Chatti allows exporting and backing up contacts directly to your own Amazon S3 bucket, either manually or automatically on a recurring schedule. For details, see the Cloud Data Export page.

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