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Customer memory

What the bot remembers and when it may reuse it​

Customer memory helps the bot avoid asking the same person for the same information in every conversation. It is not permission to invent or silently reuse personal data.

Information that may be saved​

When Configure > Allow bot to extract customer information? is on, the bot can save information the customer explicitly shares, including:

  • name
  • email address
  • phone number
  • address

It may also remember customer-stated preferences or sales context, such as a budget, location, product of interest or a requirement they described. After a confirmed real order or appointment, it may remember a short reference to that recent transaction so a later conversation has useful context.

The bot should save what the customer actually said, not infer a personal fact from a guess. A correction from the customer replaces the old value.

Each saved detail is also cut down to a fixed length before it is stored: a name, phone number or email caps at 200 characters, an address at 400, and a sales note such as a budget or requirement at 500. A customer who gives an unusually long address or a long requirement will have it saved with the tail quietly trimmed, not rejected or flagged.

Memory does not follow a customer across channels​

The bot recognizes a returning customer by the channel identity they wrote from — their WhatsApp number, their Facebook or Instagram account, or their browser session on your website widget — not by who they are as a person. If the same customer messages you on WhatsApp today and on Instagram next week, the bot treats the second conversation as a stranger with no memory: nothing it learned on WhatsApp carries over to Instagram, even though both conversations are with the same person and the same business.

Reusing saved information​

Remembering a detail and using it to answer a checkout question are separate actions.

If a saved email, phone number or address matches information required for an order or appointment, the bot may offer it back to the customer: for example, “I have your email as name@example.com. Should I use it?” It must receive an explicit yes before submitting that saved value. Silence or an unrelated reply is not consent.

The customer can instead provide a new value. The bot uses the new answer for that checkout and can update the remembered detail when the customer clearly corrected it.

How saved details reach a customer's profile​

Contact details the bot extracts — name, email, phone and address — sync to that customer's profile in Messages, but only into fields that are still empty. Once a field already holds a value, a correction the customer gives the bot later updates the bot's own memory but does not overwrite what you see on the profile. The one exception is your website widget: for name, email and phone (not address), the newest value a visitor gives always wins, since a visitor may correct a typo before you ever see their first answer.

Sales context — a budget, an objection, a location, a product of interest — is not shown on that profile or anywhere else in the dashboard. It lives only in the bot's own memory and shapes how later conversations go, without a screen where you can review it directly.

Returning customers get a different greeting​

When a customer with any saved memory starts a new conversation, the bot recognizes them as a returning customer without any extra setup beyond leaving extraction turned on. It may mention roughly how long it has been since their last contact, remind them of their last confirmed purchase or appointment (what, when, and how much), and pick back up a product or service they showed interest in but never completed. Your configured intro message also shifts to a returning-customer tone instead of the first-time greeting whenever a saved name is on file.

Control and good practice​

  • Turn off Allow bot to extract customer information? to stop automatic extraction for future conversations.
  • Do not ask customers to send passwords, complete payment-card numbers or other secrets in chat.
  • Keep checkout questions limited to information you genuinely need to fulfill the order or appointment.
  • Use Messages to inspect the conversation before acting on a saved detail that appears surprising or outdated.

Turning Allow bot to extract customer information? off only stops new details from being saved — it does not stop the bot from continuing to use what it already has. The bot keeps greeting the customer by name, offering back saved contact details at checkout, and referencing a recent purchase indefinitely, until that data is separately removed.

Turning extraction off does not by itself erase information already present in a customer profile. A short reference to a confirmed order or appointment is recorded separately from automatic contact and preference extraction, so that reference may still be added while extraction is off. Contact ReadyChatAI support if you need help with a customer's data request or removal.

Customer information belongs to that business and conversation context. It is not a source for answering another business's customers.