When an SMS, email, Facebook Messenger DM, Instagram DM, chat widget message, or contact form submission arrives from someone who is not yet in your customer list, 1sixty8 Manifold creates an Unknown Contact conversation rather than a real customer record. The conversation lands in your Inbox under Communications with the sender's name (if known) and channel of origin. You decide what to do with it.

Open Communications and click the Unknown Contact conversation. A three-button panel appears in the right context panel:

  1. + Add to Customers (green)
  2. Link to Existing (blue)
  3. Dismiss (ghost)

+ Add to Customers

Opens a modal pre-filled with what the inbound message gave us: First Name, Last Name (parsed from the sender's name), Email, Phone, plus an optional Initial Note that becomes the first activity-log entry on the new customer. The lead source is set automatically from the inbound channel (SMS / Email / Messenger / Instagram / Chat / Form). Confirm with "Add as Lead". The new customer is created with pipeline status New, the conversation is linked to them, the unknown-contact fields are cleared, and you land on the customer detail page.

Link to Existing

Opens a typeahead picker. Type at least two characters of name, phone, or email to search your customer list. Click a result to link the conversation to that customer record; the unknown-contact fields are cleared and the conversation now appears under that customer's history.

Dismiss

Soft-closes the conversation (Status = Closed). The conversation is hidden from the active Inbox view but remains in the database; you can find it again by switching the Status filter to All or Closed.

Reporting impact

Customers created via "Add as Lead" feed the Lead Source ROI report (Reports > Customers > Lead Source ROI), which tracks new leads, wins, and revenue by source channel. The auto-set lead source means you do not need to remember to tag the source manually; just confirm the right channel was detected.

Tip: prefer Link to Existing over + Add to Customers when the message clearly came from an existing customer using a different phone number. Linking keeps your customer record clean and the message history attached to the right person.