Contact Sync & Deduplication Problems

When importing contacts or managing your contact directory, you may encounter issues with duplicates, missing information, or sync errors. Here's how to resolve common contact problems.

Duplicate Contacts

Chatofy has a built-in deduplication engine that normalizes phone numbers. However, duplicates can still occur if:

• The same number is imported with different formatting (e.g., +1-555-1234 vs 15551234)
• Contacts are created via the API with different phone formats
• CSV imports contain multiple rows with the same phone number

CSV Import Issues

When using the CSV bulk import feature:

• Ensure the CSV has a header row
• Required columns: phone (or similar mapped column)
• Optional columns: first_name, last_name, tags
• Phone numbers should include the country code (e.g., +1XXXXXXXXXX)
• Files are processed in the background — large imports may take time

Missing Contact Names

When Meta sends an incoming message, it typically includes the sender's WhatsApp profile name. When the name is omitted or unavailable, Chatofy leaves the name field clean and automatically renders a formatted phone number (e.g., +91 91774 88813) through the computed display_name property, ensuring phone numbers are never written into name fields.

How to Fix Contact Issues

1. Navigate to the Contacts page
2. Search for the contact using their phone number or name
3. Edit the contact to fix the name, phone, or attributes
4. For duplicates, manually delete the extra entries
5. For bulk cleanup, export contacts, deduplicate in a spreadsheet, and reimport