When this setting applies
The prioritization setting only matters when Octopods looks up a contact by phone number and finds more than one match in your Intercom workspace. That happens for channels like WhatsApp Cloud API and SMS, where the sender is identified by phone rather than by a channel-specific handle.
Social-channel lookups that use a Custom Data Attribute (CDA) — Telegram, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, and WeChat — are not affected by this setting, because those lookups always point to the single contact that already holds the matching CDA.
The three options
Under Settings → Contact Priority, the Prioritize Contact by Phone Number card offers three choices:
Latest Updated — Octopods picks whichever matching contact was most recently updated in Intercom. This is the default.
Lead — Octopods prefers a Lead-role contact. If only a User-role contact matches, that User is used instead.
User — Octopods prefers a User-role contact. If only a Lead matches, that Lead is used instead.
The helper text on the setting reads: “When searching by phone number, choose which contact type to prioritize.”
Choosing the right option
Pick “Latest Updated” when your team works in Intercom frequently and you want incoming messages to follow whichever record your team most recently touched.
Pick “Lead” when you commonly qualify new contacts and want new channel messages to land on the Lead so you can convert or merge them deliberately.
Pick “User” when your team treats Users as the canonical record and wants every channel conversation to attach to the User profile automatically.
Note: This setting changes how new incoming messages are routed. It does not reshuffle conversations that have already been created and linked to a contact.
Updating the setting
Sign in to Octopods as an admin.
Go to Settings.
Scroll to the Contact Priority card.
Select Latest Updated, Lead, or User under Prioritize Contact by Phone Number.
Save your changes.
The next inbound message from a phone-based channel will use the new rule.
What’s next