CRM, audiences, and consent

The CRM is your customer index

Every other module knows something about your customers. The pixel knows what they browsed. The store knows what they bought. The inbox knows what they asked. The CRM is where those threads come together into one person.

It does not replace those modules. It links to them. Open a contact and you see a single timeline built from every source, without anyone copying data by hand.

What lives in the CRM

• Contacts. People, with identity links to their store account, email, phone, and web visitor record. Duplicate submissions do not create duplicate people.
• Companies. For wholesale, B2B, and agencies. Contacts belong to companies, and company records roll up activity.
• Journeys. The timeline of every touch: ad click, page view, form, order, conversation, note.
• Deals. A pipeline for sales that take more than a cart. Stages, values, owners, and expected close dates.
• Activities and tasks. Calls, meetings, and follow-ups. Follow-up tasks are real Projects tasks, so they show up in the same place as the rest of your team's work.
• Custom fields. Add whatever your business needs to track.
• Relationship ratings and roles. Star ratings and roles you set by hand stay as you set them. Automation never overwrites a human decision.

Contacts can be created automatically when a module sees a real person, such as a form submission with an email or a first order.

Audiences

An audience is a saved set of contacts defined by rules. Examples:

• Bought two or more times, no purchase in 90 days.
• Signed up for a back-in-stock alert on a product that just arrived.
• Came from YouTube and spent over a threshold.
• Opened a support conversation in the last week.

Rules can use purchase history, web behavior, storefront intent signals, conversation history, custom fields, and consent status. Audiences update as people qualify or fall out. Every audience is previewed before it is saved so you know exactly who is in it.

Consent is checked at send time

This is the most important rule in the CRM. Being in an audience is not the same as being allowed to receive a message.

• Consent is recorded only when the person actually opted in. A back-in-stock request or a help form does not create marketing permission. A separately checked marketing box does, with its evidence.
• Your workspace chooses whether marketing email requires confirmed double opt-in or allows single opt-in.
• Immediately before any automated message sends, the CRM checks consent and suppression again. If the person unsubscribed after joining the audience, the message does not go.
• Discount codes for offers are kept protected and released to the sending module only when the offer is still valid.

The result is that you can build audiences freely, knowing the send step enforces the rules.

Activating audiences to ad platforms

Audiences are useful beyond email. You can send one to Google, Meta, or another connected ad platform for retargeting, lookalike seeding, or exclusion.

Activation is treated as a high-impact action because it moves customer data outside the workspace.

1. You or your AI assistant define the audience and preview it.
2. The activation request states exactly which audience goes to which platform and why.
3. You approve the exact request.
4. The workspace checks everything again and sends identifiers to the platform in hashed form, respecting consent.

If CRM access is turned off for a user or a connection, the action is simply unavailable. There is no fallback path around the approval.

Asking your assistant

With Workspace MCP connected, the CRM answers questions in plain English:

• "Who are our top 50 customers by lifetime value and when did they last buy?"
• "Build an audience of people who bought the blue model but never the accessory kit. Preview it."
• "Add a note to this contact that they asked for a manager callback."

Reads happen instantly. Edits to contacts and audiences follow the same approval rules as everything else.

Goals and insights

Set goals for revenue, new contacts, or deals won, and watch progress on the Insights page. Because the CRM sees every module, the numbers reflect confirmed orders and real conversations, not estimates.

Working with your operator

Orkie operators set up your identity rules, consent settings, and first audiences during onboarding, then maintain them. If your list has history in another tool, they will plan the import with you.

Talk to us to see a customer timeline built from your data, or contact us.

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Last reviewed 2026-09-20. Something unclear? Tell us and we will fix the article.