# Stages, owners and labels

Track where each customer is in your sales flow, who looks after them, and group them with labels you can filter, export and message.

Three fields on every profile turn the customer list into a simple sales pipeline:

- **Stage**: where the person is, from first contact to paying customer.
- **Owner**: the employee who looks after them.
- **Labels**: free words that group customers, such as `vip`, `wholesale` or `tet-gift`.

You set them on the profile page or in the customer panel of the **Inbox**. You need **Work** access to CRM to change them.

## Stages

| Stage | Use it when |
|---|---|
| **New** | Every profile starts here: the person has written to you, nothing more |
| **Contacted** | Your team has answered and the conversation is going |
| **Qualified** | They have a real need and a budget: a quote is on its way |
| **Customer** | They have bought |
| **Lost** | They decided not to buy, or stopped answering |

Ha Tang never moves a stage by itself, not even when an order is paid, so the stage always means what your team decided. Agree in the team on when to move a customer, then keep to it: the list and the exports are only as useful as the stages are consistent.

## Owners

The owner is the person responsible for the relationship, which is not the same as who answers a given conversation. A customer can have one owner, or **Nobody**.

- Any employee of the business can be an owner.
- Routing rules can send a returning customer's new conversation to their owner first: tick **Prefer the customer's owner** on the rule (on by default for new rules). The owner still has to be among the rule's agents and, if the rule says so, online. See [Distribution rules](https://hatang.dev/help/automation/routing-rules).
- Filter the list by **Owner**, or by **No owner** to find customers nobody is following up.

## Labels

Type labels in **Labels (comma separated)** on the profile, or click **+ label** in the inbox panel.

- Labels are saved in lower case, and repeats are removed: `VIP, vip` becomes `vip`.
- On the profile page, a space or comma ends a label, so join words with a hyphen: `tet-gift`, not `tet gift`.
- There is no list to set up in advance: a label exists as soon as one customer has it, and it appears in the **Label** filter.

Labels on customers are different from **conversation tags**, which describe a single conversation (a complaint, a price question). See [Conversation tags](https://hatang.dev/help/inbox/conversation-tags).

## Work with a group

1. Go to **CRM → Customers**.
2. Pick a **Stage**, **Owner**, **Channel** or **Label**, and click **Filter**.

![The customer list filtered to one owner's customers](https://hatang.dev/help/img/en/customers/stages.webp)

The buttons at the top then act on exactly that group:

- **Export CSV** downloads it (see [Export customers and sync them to email](https://hatang.dev/help/customers/import-export)).
- **Send ZNS** sends a Zalo template message to everyone in it with a phone number (see [Send ZNS to a group of customers](https://hatang.dev/help/customers/send-zns)).
- **Sync to Email** copies everyone with an email address into an email audience for broadcasts.

## Examples

| Goal | Filter |
|---|---|
| Follow up on open quotes | Stage **Qualified**, Owner: your name |
| Find customers nobody owns | Owner **No owner** |
| Invite last year's gift buyers to this year's Tết campaign | Label `tet-gift`, Stage **Customer** |
| See who came from Zalo and has not bought | Channel **Zalo**, Stage **Contacted** |