Tags Versus Custom Fields

Every organization has unique information and attributes that it needs to track about contacts. Many customers have trouble deciding how to set it up their contacts when it comes to tags or custom fields.

There is no right or wrong way to use Highrise. You can setup your account to get more value out of your contact information.

When to use a tag

Tags are best used for values that will be reused across many contacts, with more than 100 as a guideline. For example, if you have thousands of contacts and a few different types of relationships with them, such as prospects and vendors, you could use tags like  customer and vendor to designate what type of relationship you have with a particular contact.

Many Highrise customers find themselves, after several years, with long lists of tags in their Highrise account.

Before creating a new tag, ask yourself if this tag could be used on 100 or more contacts.

If not, then that information might be better suited to for a custom field.

Tags enable better information tracking

Tags are also a good choice for any kind of information you want to track closely.

You can subscribe to a daily digest of emails about a tag, or see a list of notes and emails added to contacts with a particular tag.

For example, when providing customer service and support, your team could use a tag to track contacts who had a particular problem, such as  billing-issues.

By subscribing to the  billing-issues tag, you can get updated whenever a contact has billing issues and follow the communication they have with your team.

When to use a custom field

We recommend using a custom field for any value that is never (or almost never) reused in Highrise. For example, if you assign a unique number or ID to each of your customers, you can create a custom field called  Customer ID to enter that information.

Custom fields are also ideal for any information which has a small set of possible values. If your company offers 3 different services, for example, you might create pre-defined values for each type of service, such as landscaping, hardscaping, or pest control.