When the card cannot name a customer
A card that cannot name a customer is not a broken card. Most of the time it is a request raised from a personal address, or by somebody who is genuinely not in the CRM, and an agent needs to know that in one line and get on with the request. The states below are all ordinary, and none of them is shown as an error.
What is worth knowing up front is how little the card can tell you about why. Several quite different situations end in the same sentence, and an agent has no way to tell them apart from the issue.
#The request has no reporter
Requests raised by email, or through a portal that does not require signing in, often have no reporter on them at all. The card says "This request has no reporter, so there is no customer to look up." and looks nothing up. Nothing is wrong and nothing needs fixing.
#The reporter has no address the app can read
When there is a reporter but Jira returns no address for them, the card says "No email address is available for this reporter." and stops there.
It deliberately gives no reason, because there are three and the app cannot tell them apart: the account was deleted, the person's Atlassian profile keeps their address from apps, or the site has not approved the app's permission to read reporter email addresses. Guessing would send somebody to the wrong settings page. If every card on the site says this, the permission is the place to start.
#Nothing in Attio matches
When the address or domain was readable and Attio holds no matching record, the card says "No Attio record matches this reporter." A project administrator sees one extra line under it, "Which Attio attribute reporters are matched on is a project setting.", followed by a link reading "Open project settings". An agent sees the first sentence alone, with nothing to press.
In company mode, four different dead ends read as one sentence. A reporter on a free-mail domain, an address with no domain in it, a domain no record holds and a domain too many records share all produce "No Attio record matches this reporter." Nothing on the card distinguishes them, so an agent cannot tell a reporter writing from Gmail from a customer who is genuinely missing from your CRM. When you need to know which it was, type the same address into the test box on the Fields screen: the preview there names the outcome instead of reducing it to one sentence.
#More than one record matches
When several records match, the card does not guess. It marks itself with a warning and says either "More than one record matches this reporter." or, when the lookup came back full, "4 or more records match this reporter." It then lists up to three candidates for the agent to open in Attio.
Records that match | Match the person | Match their company |
|---|---|---|
One | The record, with its values | The record, with its values |
Two or three | A list of candidates | A list of candidates |
Four or more | A list of three candidates, headed "4 or more records match this reporter." | Nothing. The card reads as a plain no-match |
The count above three is never a precise number. Attio's answers carry no total, so the app asks for one more record than it will ever show and reports what it knows, which is a floor rather than a count.
Each candidate shows the record's title and one line of detail, the date the record was added to Attio, written as "Added" and the date. That is all. No attribute from the record is used, because nobody chose one for the card, and the email address is never used either, since every candidate matched the same address anyway. There is no way to pick one from the card: it is telling you to go and sort it out in Attio.
#The same answer every time
Attio returns query results in no particular order, so both lookups ask for a fixed sort, by when the record was created and then by its identifier. The same request therefore shows the same record, or the same candidates in the same order, on every refresh, rather than swapping customers between one view and the next.
#How long an answer lasts
A matched record, a no-match and a candidate list are each kept for fifteen minutes and shared by everybody looking at requests from that customer in that project. A customer added to Attio this morning can take that long to appear on a request somebody has already opened.
Failures and rate limits are never kept, so one bad minute upstream does not become fifteen minutes of an empty card.
Changes made in project settings bypass the window: the next view re-reads from Attio.
Change the reporter on a request and the address is read again rather than the previous reporter's answer being reused.
There is no refresh control on a working card. "Try again" appears only on an error or a rate-limit message.
#When setup is the problem
A project that has not finished its setup tells project administrators exactly which piece is missing, in one sentence with a link into settings: no Attio workspace connected, no record type chosen, "Nobody has chosen the attribute reporters are matched on.", no attributes chosen to show, or no placement chosen. None of those sentences is shown to an agent, and a viewer who is not in the audience for the card sees nothing rendered at all.
#A few things worth knowing
"No Attio record matches this reporter." is the commonest sentence on the card and the least informative. Before you go looking for a missing CRM record, check whether the reporter is on a free-mail domain, which produces exactly the same words.
A candidate list means the agent is being asked to do the disambiguation in Attio, not on the card. If your agents see it often when matching people, the attribute you match on is one Attio does not enforce as unique, so what they are really being shown is duplicate records in the CRM.
An agent cannot see the difference between a project that is half set up and a project whose lookup found nothing, because the setup sentences are shown to project administrators only. If agents report a blank or unhelpful card, open the same issue as an administrator before believing the CRM is at fault.
#Related
A card that says nothing is usually telling the truth.
