Every business has a few pieces of information it cannot work without. A customer number, the plan they pay for, their city, the date of their next appointment. Standard fields like name, phone and email never cover them, so they end up in notes, in a spreadsheet, or in an agent's memory.
Custom attributes fix that. A custom attribute is your own field on a contact or a conversation record. You define it once in Settings, Custom Attributes, and from then on it appears in the side panel of every conversation and on every contact record. This guide follows the help center article Atributos personalizados: tus propios campos.
Conversation or contact
There are two tabs, and the choice matters:
Conversation: data about that case, such as the order being discussed or the reason for the request.
Contact: data about the person, which travels with them to all their conversations, such as customer number, plan or city.
A useful test: if the value would be the same next month in a new conversation, it belongs on the contact. If it only makes sense for this case, put it on the conversation.
Create an attribute
Apply to: conversation or contact.
Display name: the label your team sees.
Key: the technical name, with no spaces. It is what the API, automations and AI agents use, and it cannot be changed later, so choose it carefully.
Description: what the attribute is for.
Type: text, number, link, date, list (you choose the options) or checkbox.
Enable regex validation: for text, forces a format, for example an ID document number.
What custom attributes are for
Filters and segments: in Contacts you can filter by any attribute and save the segment, for example as the audience of a WhatsApp campaign.
Automations: a rule can check an attribute or set its value.
AI agents: an AI agent can read the contact's attributes and write them with its tools. It can also behave differently when an attribute is marked, such as direct attention or internal staff.
AI classifications: when they are on, HellouOne creates conversation attributes such as Customer sentiment or Asks for a person and fills them in by itself. You can correct them by hand; they are recalculated with the next message.
That last point shows how far attributes go. They are not just a place for agents to type; they are where HellouOne itself stores what it learns about a conversation, as described in AI classifications in HellouOne.
Deleting an attribute
When you delete the definition, the value disappears from every record. If you only want to stop using an attribute, keep it and remove it from the forms instead, so the values you already collected stay available.
Choosing keys and types
Because the key cannot be changed later and is what the API, automations and AI agents use, pick short, descriptive keys with no spaces, such as customer_number, plan or appointment_date. Prefer a list over free text whenever the answers are a known set, like plan names or cities you serve: a list keeps values consistent, which makes filters and segments reliable. Use a date type for dates and a number type for amounts, so they can be compared instead of read as text.
Good first attributes
Contact: customer number, plan, city, preferred language.
Conversation: order number, reason for contact, appointment date.
A checkbox for internal staff, so AI agents and automations can treat colleagues differently from customers.
How this works with HellouOne
Custom attributes are where the HellouOne shared inbox keeps the data your business actually runs on. The AI agent reads them to personalise a reply and writes them as it collects details in the chat, automations check and set them, and saved segments built on them become WhatsApp campaign audiences. Contact attributes sit on the customer record described in Contacts in HellouOne, so the next agent sees them too.
Learn more in the help center: Atributos personalizados: tus propios campos, part of the Account Settings guides.
