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Why are my contacts marked as missing data?
Why are my contacts marked as missing data?

Learn why your contacts have "Missing data" status and what you can do about it

Reply Team avatar
Written by Reply Team
Updated over a week ago

Some of the contacts in your sequences may be marked as "Missing data" for a number of reasons. You can check the status on the People β†’ Contacts page, or navigate to Sequences, open the necessary sequence, and click the People tab. The status will be shown in the grid labeled with a red color, as shown below:

Why are contacts marked as "Missing data"?

There are several reasons why the contacts may have "Missing data" status:

  • The data is missing in the contact profile

Some data required as variables in the Step templates of your sequence may be missing. If the corresponding field in the contact profile is empty, the system will flag the contact for missing data. This will prevent these contacts from receiving messages from the sequence.

  • The phone number is invalid

Another reason why the status of the contact can be "Missing data" is that the added phone number in the contact profile is invalid. If there is an auto SMS step, the system will first check whether the phone number is valid and only then send an auto SMS. In the event that the phone number is invalid, the system will assign a "Missing data" status.

Check what data is missing

You can also check the status of missing data as well as exactly which field is missing on the Preview tab in your Sequence. For this follow these steps:

  1. Open the needed sequence and navigate to the Preview tab.

  2. On the left side panel, you will see the list of all your contacts in sequence. For those contacts that have missing data, the corresponding icon will be shown.

Therefore, any time your contacts have any missing data, it is going to be reflected on the Preview tab.

3. Hover over the icon of missing data and you will see the list of exact fields that are missing in the contact's profile card.

4. Click on the contact and you will see all the steps the contact is linked to. For each step, the icon for missing data will be shown as well so you can hover over it and see what data is missing.

How can you fix the "Missing data" status?

There are several ways to add missing data:

Option 1:

  1. Open the People page and navigate to the Contacts tab.

  2. Click on the contacts whose data is missing to view the contact profile card.

  3. In front of the fields with missing data, you will see an icon so you can easily recognize those fields. By hovering on the icon, you will also see the exact sequence(s) where this data is needed.

  4. Add all the details. Then, click Save.

Option 2:

  1. Open the needed sequence and navigate to the Preview tab.

  2. Click on the contact with missing data, then expand the particular steps where variables are missing.

  3. Add missing information or remove variables from the steps.

  4. Then, click Save.

Once you change and add data, the icon with a number of missing fields will change automatically so you can check the progress of adding missing data.

Option 3:

You can also remove variables from the steps when viewing the steps in the sequence.

Option 4:

Additionally, you can download the CSV file with all data about contacts along with missing fields. For this, follow these steps:

  1. Open the People page and navigate to the Contacts tab.

  2. Select all the needed contacts with missing data.

  3. Click More on the top of the grid. Then, select Export to CSV and All fields.

4. Open the file. All the fields with missing data will be marked with the corresponding title "MISSING" so you can easily recognize those fields and add all the details.

Note: It is not mandatory to add all the missing fields, you can add just a few.

5. Save your file and upload it to the Reply (People β†’ Contacts tab β†’ click New contact β†’ Import from CSV). The new data will appear in the contacts' profiles.

Important:

Once you add ALL the missing fields, the status of the contact will be changed to active automatically.

Then, Reply will either move the contact to the next step, if the issue has been resolved or it will reassign missing data back again if you actually haven't fixed this.

Please also note that you can make the status of your contacts active manually. For this, open the People page, select all contacts with an invalid status, and set the status to "Active."

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