Fill in your contacts automatically with Context.dev

Most contact lists fill up the same way: a name and an email address, and not much else. Before you call someone, you want to know what they do, where they are and where to find them online. Looking that up by hand, person by person, is the kind of job that never gets done.

So we taught Devias to do it. With Context.dev connected, it looks a person up and fills in what is missing on their record: their job title, their city and country, their LinkedIn, X and GitHub profiles and a website. If the company they work for is already in your CRM, it links the two.

How it works

Open the ⋯ menu on a person, on their page or on their row in the table, and choose Enrich this person. It works in the background, so you can carry on with what you were doing. In the table, a small spinner turns beside the person’s name while they are being looked up. When it is done you get a short message saying how it went, for example Nothing new to fill in.

If you would rather not do it person by person, there is an automation called Enrich new people. It looks up everyone who is added to your CRM from then on. We ship it switched off, and the next section explains why.

You stay in control of the cost

Context.dev is its own service with its own account. You bring your own key, and each match costs 20 credits there. Because a lookup costs something, we built the feature to spend as little as possible:

• Nobody is looked up twice. A person who was found is not looked up again for 30 days. Someone Context.dev could not find is not tried again for a day.
• Nothing runs on its own until you say so. The automation for new people starts off, so you decide whether every new contact is worth the credits.
• Imported contacts are left alone. Importing a spreadsheet of a thousand people does not use up a thousand lookups.

It never overwrites what you wrote

Enrichment only fills in what is empty. If you typed someone’s job title yourself, it stays. You can run it as often as you like, and the worst that happens is Nothing new to fill in.

It does not guess

A lookup can come back with someone who only looks like your contact. Context.dev rates how sure it is on a scale from 0 to 100, and Devias only writes a match to your record when the score is 70 or more. You can change that number: lower it and more people get filled in, at the risk of filling in the wrong one.

When there is too little to go on, Devias tells you what to add instead of making a lookup that would fail. For example: Not enough to go on. Add the person’s email, or a last name and a company or a city. The email is the best clue. Without one, a first and last name together with a company or a city is enough. A free address, like a personal Gmail, says nothing about who someone is, so for those Devias goes by their name and where they work or live instead.

When something goes wrong

You should not have to watch it. If Context.dev is busy or briefly unreachable, Devias waits and tries again by itself, up to five times, leaving more time between each try. A person waiting for another try is marked as such on their page. If your key is rejected, Devias asks you to replace it instead of failing every lookup one by one, and if your account is out of credits it says so plainly.

What leaves your server

Devias runs on your own server, so it is worth being clear about what is shared. To find a person, it sends Context.dev what it already knows about them: their email address, their name, and their company or city. Nothing else from your CRM leaves. You can test your key before you use it, and testing does not spend a credit.

Try it

Enrichment is a module you add to Devias, and it builds on the CRM, so install the CRM first. Then add the Enrichment module, paste in your Context.dev key, and open the ⋯ menu on a person. Like the rest of Devias it is open source, and you can read how it is made if you are curious.