CRM setup

Vocallie doesn't ship a fixed pipeline, because a dental practice, an estate agency and an insurance broker don't have the same one. You define your own here, and everything else — the contacts board, campaign filters, automation conditions, smart routing — uses what you defined.

CRM → CRM Setup

Three things live on this page.

Pipeline stages

The ordered steps a contact moves through. New accounts start with five sensible defaults — New, Contacted, Qualified, Won, Lost — which you can rename, recolour, delete or replace entirely.

Each stage has a label (what you see) and a key (the machine name, derived from the label when you create it). The key is fixed once created; renaming the label is safe and doesn't break anything.

Designing your stages

The temptation is to model every nuance. Resist — every stage you add is one more thing to keep accurate. Good pipelines are usually five to seven stages that each represent a real decision point.

Ask of each one: would I do something differently for a contact in this stage? If not, it doesn't need to exist.

Where stages get used

• The pipeline board in Contacts — one column per stage.
• Filters everywhere, including when picking contacts for a campaign.
• Automation conditions and actions — "if the contact is in Qualified…", "move them to Booked".
• Smart routing — send callers to a different agent based on their stage. (Professional and above.)
• The agent itself — it can move a contact's stage mid-call if you've enabled that in Agents → Actions. It's only allowed to use stages you've defined.

Contact tags

Coloured labels that cut across stages: Hot lead, VIP, Existing customer, Do not email. A contact can have any number of them.

Use tags for things that are true regardless of pipeline position, and stages for progress. If you find yourself creating a tag called "qualified" you probably wanted a stage.

Adding a tag that already exists just updates its colour rather than creating a duplicate. Deleting a tag happens instantly with no confirmation, so click carefully.

Custom fields

Extra information you want on every contact, with proper types:

Fields appear on every contact record with the right input for their type, and can be filled in three ways: by you, by a CSV import, or by the agent during a call.

That last one is the interesting part. In Agents → Actions you can tell the agent to collect specific fields, with a description of what it's asking for. The caller answers naturally and the structured field gets filled.

Practical notes

• There's no page-level save. Every add, edit and delete is applied immediately.
• Deleting a field keeps the data. Values already stored on contacts remain — they just stop being displayed. Recreate a field with the same name and they reappear.
• Two stages whose names produce the same key will collide and the second one won't save. Rename one.
• Reordering isn't available in the panel yet. New stages and fields are appended to the end.
• Nothing here is plan-gated. Every plan can define stages, tags and fields. What's gated is routing by stage, which needs Professional.

A worked example

A dental practice:

• Stages: Enquiry → Consultation booked → Treatment plan sent → Treatment booked → Completed → Lost.
• Tags: Nervous patient, Private, NHS, Referral.
• Fields: Treatment interest (dropdown), Insurance provider (text), Preferred day (dropdown), Last visit (date).

With that in place, the agent can qualify a caller, fill the fields from the conversation, move them to Consultation booked when it books them, and an automation can schedule a follow-up for anyone still sitting in Treatment plan sent after a week.