One person, many handles
The platform separates the customer (a person) from their identities
(one per channel handle) and from leads (a conversation record).
A customer who messages on WhatsApp after using the website widget is
recognised as the same person — so a cart started in one place is still theirs
in the other.
Merges are conservative
Identities merge only on a verified contact detail: a phone number the
platform actually received a message from, or a confirmed email. Never on a
name, never on similarity, never probabilistically.
This is deliberate. A wrong merge hands one customer another customer’s
conversation and order history — the kind of mistake that cannot be
apologised away.
buyer_ref
Your tools receive a stable reference for the person in the conversation. Use
it as the key for their cart, their tier and their history.
Treat buyer_ref as a pseudonymous key, not proof of anything. Whether that
buyer is verified for wholesale, allowed a discount, or permitted to see an
order is your decision, resolved from your own records against the
workspace the auth token identifies.
What you should not ask for
Do not require a phone number or email as a tool argument to identify someone.
The platform already knows who is talking; asking again makes the assistant
interrogate a customer it has already recognised, which reads as forgetting
them.
