If the customer you are looking for is missing from the Contacts screen, the record having been deleted is the least likely explanation. In most cases there is a forgotten filter in the address bar, a narrowed contact scope on your role, or a channel type that has been switched off. Work through the steps below in order.
You may have run into one of these situations:
The list looks completely empty
The person I am looking for will not show up in search
The person is not in the list but their conversation is in the inbox
The Contacts section is missing from the menu, or the card says "not found"
I see the same customer twice
The list looks completely empty
The sentence on screen tells you which case you are in; read it first.
If it says "No contacts match the filter.", your contacts are still there — the filter simply matches none of them. Check these:
Look at the number badge on the Filters button: how many filters are on?
Press the Clear filters link.
Press the cross at the right of the search box to clear the search too (the clear link keeps the search).
A page number may be left over in the address bar; after clearing, the list opens on page one.
If you arrived by clicking a segment, that segment's filter is applied too.
The most common trap is choosing the Last message and Quiet for filters together: "wrote in the last 7 days" and "quiet for 30 days" exclude each other, so the list always comes back empty.
If it says "No contacts yet.", no message has ever arrived at this account. On a newly connected account that is normal; a contact only exists after a real interaction and can never be added by hand.
The person I am looking for will not show up in search
Search looks at four fields only: name, username, phone and e-mail. It looks at nothing else.
Try these in order:
Search by username. The person's card may have no name; when Instagram does not return profile information, a long number is shown in the list and searching by name will not work.
Type only the first few letters. Search matches anywhere in the value, so you do not have to type the full name.
Do not simplify accented letters. Search matches the characters you type as they are: typing "Muller" may not find "Müller".
Try the phone number without spaces. The number may be stored with spaces or brackets; search for a short fragment instead (7700900 for example).
Stop searching by message content. Search does not look at messaging. To find a word inside a message, use the inbox search: Searching conversations and messages.
Clear the other filters. Search works together with the filters that are on; with a tag filter active, search only looks inside that tag.
Note text and custom field values never take part in search.
The person is not in the list but their conversation is in the inbox
There are three possible reasons.
The channel type has been switched off in the portfolio. Contacts of a switched-off channel type do not appear in the list and the type has no option in the filter. Check your channel settings.
Your role's contact scope has been narrowed. In a role scoped to "your own conversations only", the customers of conversations not assigned to you are not in the list. They become visible when you assign the conversation to yourself or when your scope is widened. See Access and visibility policy.
The person has no conversation at all. Somebody who arrived from an ad or a link and never wrote may not have a conversation yet. In a role with a narrowed contact scope, a person who is in nobody's conversation is not visible: the scope is worked out from "my conversations", and a person without a conversation is in nobody's. In a full-scope role (owner, administrator) the same person is in the list.
Before asking your administrator to check: share the same address with them and see whether it shows up for them. If it does, the issue is scope.
The Contacts section is missing from the menu, or the card says "not found"
The Contacts section can be switched off entirely by the portfolio's access policy. When it is off, the section is not in the menu and typing the address by hand will not open it. That is a setting, not a fault; ask your portfolio administrator.
If a contact card says "not found", there are four possible reasons, and the panel deliberately does not say which (so you cannot even tell whether the card exists):
The contact really has been deleted.
The contact belongs to another account — you may have copied the link from a different account.
The contact's channel type has been switched off.
The contact is outside your scope.
If you have a link, confirm that the account name in the address matches the account you currently have open.
I see the same customer twice
This is not a fault. A contact belongs to an account:
If the same human wrote to both your Instagram and your WhatsApp, you see two separate cards. The two channels use two different identities and the panel does not merge them.
If you have two Instagram accounts and the same person wrote to both, again you get two cards.
There is no operation that merges cards. The practical fix is to put the same tag on both cards, so the filter returns them together. The Channel column tells you which card belongs to which account (that column is drawn only when you have more than one connected account).
Other known limits
The list is sorted by the last incoming message; you cannot change the sort by clicking column headers.
There are no filters for fields, source or follow state. To build a list from that information, add a tag with a flow and filter by the tag.
The tag filter shows at most 200 distinct tags; you can still reach a missing tag by clicking its badge in a row.
The CSV file does not apply the filter on screen; it downloads every contact you can see.
Search does not look at notes, messages or custom fields.
Contacts cannot be added by hand.
If the problem continues
Remove every parameter from the address bar and open the plain contacts address.
Reload the page fully (your browser cache may be showing an old list).
Confirm you are on the right account using the account picker at the top.
Share the same address with a full-permission colleague and see whether it shows up for them.
If the person's conversation is in the inbox, use the contact-card link in the conversation's right panel.
If you have worked through every step and the problem persists, get in touch with our Support team.