Uploading a contact list

This article discusses how to create a new contact list.

Uploading your contact list

Before you begin your upload, you will need to prepare your file. See this article for more information.

Once you have your file ready for upload, in your Admin account:

1. Go to the Contact Lists page.
2. Go to the Contact Lists subpage.
3. Click the button.

The Create contact list form is split into several sections.

Calling list details

First you must choose if you are creating a new contact list in LeadDesk or adding contacts to an existing list. For this article, we are creating a new contact list.

4. To upload a new list, choose Create contact list.
5. Name of the calling list. You will see this name wherever the list appears in LeadDesk. Type a name that will remind you what the list is for.
6. Legend. Lets you give more details about the list to further describe its use.
7. Click the Office dropdown list to select which office the list is associated with, if any.
8. Click the Sponsor dropdown list to select which sponsor the list is associated with, if any.

9. The field Contact list group lets you create a label for your contact lists. These labels can be used when creating reports to collect data together from multiple contact lists with the same label.
10. Default call attempts determines how many times numbers in this list can be called.
11. Expiry date determines when the list stops being valid.
12. Calling time allows you to specify the times of day contacts on this list may be called. Specify an earliest time, a latest time, and which time zone these times are for.

Import contact list

For more information about preparing your file for upload, see this article.

13. Click the Choose File button.
14. Browse to find your file and click to select it.
15. Click the Open button.

Optional settings

By default, LeadDesk will try to standardise the names and phone numbers in your contact list file, taking out unnecessary characters from phone numbers and capitalising names. These options are particularly useful if you use templates to generate messages.

16. Click to tick Disable automatic phone number formatting to turn off the standardisation of phone number formats.
17. Click to tick Disable automatic contact name formatting to turn off the standardisation of name formats.
18. Likewise, by default, LeadDesk will randomise the order of your contact list when you upload it. Click to tick Keep list order to prevent this randomising.
19. Finally, click to tick Create new project for the new list to create an outbound campaign associated with the list when you upload it.

Filtering

LeadDesk will also try to make the list more efficient, removing duplicate numbers from the list, and automatically removing numbers that are found in specified blacklists.

20. Click to untick Remove duplicate numbers inside the list that you’re about to upload to keep duplicates. If you are using outbound calling, this will result in the same number being called multiple times.
21. Click to untick Remove numbers from your list if they are found from blacklist to keep contacts with blacklisted numbers on your contact list.
22. You can choose which blacklists the upload checks. Click to select a list or hold the Ctrl key and click to select multiple lists.

23. You may want to filter out contacts with no phone number, but if you work inbound with contacts sending you emails, you may also want to click to tick Add also contacts without phone number.
24. If you tick Filter out contacts that are already on selected contact lists, you can remove contacts from this list that are duplicated in one or more other contact lists. You can check for duplicates by either Phone number or VAT number.

B2B

If you have the B2B feature enabled, you have the option of grouping contacts from the same company together. The grouping can be prioritised by two fields, selected from the dropdown lists 1. grouping priority and 2. grouping priority.

You can also tick the checkbox to set all comments for a company to be global.

Finalising the upload

When you are ready to complete the upload:

25. Click the Create button in the top right of the screen.

If you used the LeadDesk template for your upload, your contact list will be complete. If not, you will need to match fields.

Matching fields

LeadDesk will automatically match fields where it can, but where field names are not the same, you need to manually match them. In the above example:

• Drag the Surname field in the right-hand column to match it to the Last name field in the left.
• Whichever phone number you want to be primary should be dragged from the right to the Phone number field on the left. Other phone number fields can be matched to other fields on the left.
• The Title field on the left has been matched with Job title A better match would be the Title field on the right.

When the matching is complete, scroll down and click the Create contact list button at the bottom of the screen.

Upload complete

When you create a contact list, you will see a summary of the new list in a new table at the top of the Contact Lists page.

It may take some time to process the new list, represented by a progress bar in the Progress column. Once it is complete, the progress bar changes to Ready.

The table shows a summary of the contacts in the list, if any were not uploaded because of blacklist rules and any duplicates found.

You can dismiss this table by clicking the – on the righthand side.

If you ticked the option to create a new campaign based on this contact list, a new outbound campaign with the same name as your contact list will be available in the Projects page.