Everyone you need to reach, in one place

What is Spoke Phone Contact Directories

Contact Directories is the unified contact system inside Spoke Phone. Internal colleagues, external customers and suppliers, CRM contacts, and personal business contacts all live in one place, accessible from the Directory icon on any device. Whatever a user needs to do — call, message, conference, record — they start from one screen.

Spoke Phone also supports protected phonebooks: CRM-assigned contact lists where visibility is controlled per user, so people only see the customers they're authorized to handle. For regulated businesses, this means the phone system respects the same access rules as the CRM automatically, on every call and message.

The problem it solves

Most business phone systems separate what should be connected. The internal directory lives in one tool, CRM contacts in another. For field-based staff and account managers, the path of least resistance is to save customer numbers directly to their personal phone. It's faster than saving to the CRM and it works, but it means those contacts never make it into the business's records at all.

That creates a compliance gap that's easy to miss. When an agent is using their personal phone's address book instead of the CRM, conversations happen outside the system. There's no record of who called, no audit trail, and no way to hand a contact to a colleague when the territory changes. Agents and reps will only use a company's system if they have a convenient business directory to reach for first.

When a new account manager takes over a territory, their assigned contacts don't appear anywhere in the phone system. When a customer calls an agent on a number the agent hasn't saved, the agent has no idea who's calling before they answer.

The result is wasted time, missed context, and contact lists that don't reflect how the business actually works.

How it works

Spoke Phone's contact directory has three sections: Favorites, Internal, and External. Internal shows every Spoke Phone user in the company with live availability and presence, so people can see who's online, busy, or offline before calling. External holds customer and supplier contacts, including those synced from the CRM. Favorites gives fast access to the contacts each person reaches most often.

For businesses where contact records are managed in multiple systems, searching the external directory works across multiple sources at once. Type a name, keyword, or phrase and Spoke Phone finds matches across every contact source simultaneously, no need to know where contact records come from. Tap any result to open a contact profile card and call, message, conference, or record directly from there.

Assigned contacts from the CRM, or any other connected systems, sync into each agent's External directory automatically. When a sales rep's territory changes, their contact list in Spoke updates without any manual step.

My Contacts gives each user a personal business phonebook for contacts they use in their work but choose not to save to the company CRM. Keep the CRM clean while ensuring those contacts are still available in Spoke across all the user's devices. Whether to allow My Contacts is an admin setting: businesses that require all contacts to flow through the CRM can restrict users to company-authorized contacts only.

Protected phonebooks take the assigned contacts capability further for regulated environments. Each agent's directory is limited to the customers they're authorized to handle in the CRM — territory assignments, role-based access, and relationship boundaries are all respected automatically. An agent searching for a contact they don't have rights to simply won't find them. If a customer from a protected phonebook does call an agent who isn't assigned to them, Spoke hides the customer's name, contact details, insights and CRM data, showing only the number — so sensitive customer information stays protected across the incoming call screen, the active call screen, and in messages.

Who benefits

Field teams, account managers, and support agents who need to reach customers and suppliers quickly without switching between apps. Managers who want contact lists to reflect current territory assignments without maintaining them separately in the phone system. Anyone who takes inbound calls from external numbers and needs to know immediately who's on the line.

The concrete outcome

A person opens Spoke Phone, searches a name, and is on a call within seconds — whether that contact is a colleague, a customer from the CRM, or a personal business contact saved in My Contacts. The directory reflects the current state of the business, not last week's import.

What you get

• Internal directory: every Spoke Phone user with live availability and presence status
• External directory: customers, suppliers, and CRM contacts in one searchable list
• Favorites tab: fast access to most-used contacts from both directories
• Search across all external contact sources simultaneously
• Contact profile cards with call, message, conference, and record actions
• Assigned contacts per user synced from CRM automatically
• Restricted contact visibility: for regulated environments, contact names are hidden in real time from agents without CRM access rights
• My Contacts: a personal business phonebook per user for contacts used in their work but not needed in the company CRM, synced across all their devices and not bloating the rest of the companies phone books
• Configurable admin settings: for example, allow personal contacts or restrict users to company-authorized contacts only