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A customer is a person who has interacted with your organization — scanning a QR code, viewing a page, or chatting with a bot. Awardee unifies all of that activity, across visits and devices, onto one profile.

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Leads and users

Every customer has a kind:
  • lead — anonymous. Created automatically the first time someone interacts, identified only by a device cookie.
  • user — identified. A lead becomes a user the moment we learn an email, phone, or external_id for them (for example, when they give an email in a conversation, or you send one via the API).
When a lead becomes identified, their earlier anonymous activity stays attached — and if the same person shows up on another device, the two are linked into a single customer.

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Identity resolution

Customers are resolved by their identity keys, in order of strength:
  1. external_id — your own stable id (strongest)
  2. email
  3. phone
  4. device cookie (weakest)
POST /customers upserts by these keys: send an external_id and/or email and Awardee will find the matching customer or create one. The call always returns 200 and never reveals whether the customer already existed.
Tracking runs for every visitor regardless of plan, but the Customers dashboard and these API endpoints require a plan that includes customer profiles.

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Custom attributes

Beyond the built-in fields (location, device, session counts, first/last seen), you can define your own attributes in the dashboard and set their values via custom_attributes on the upsert and update calls. Unknown keys — or values that don’t match an attribute’s type — are rejected.

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Deleting a customer

DELETE /customers/{id} performs a GDPR-complete erasure: it removes the customer and their identities, tags, and notes, nulls their analytics events, and re-anonymizes any linked conversations.