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Attributes are the contact data your AI Employee can work with during a conversation — first name, last name, email, phone, plus any custom field defined under Settings → Attributes. Heyy’s built-in CRM stores these fields for every contact, and this tab is the permission layer between the employee and that CRM — the same principle of least-necessary-access you’d apply to a human employee’s database access applies here: grant permissions deliberately, field by field, based on what the role genuinely requires. Your employee typically operates across multiple channels — WhatsApp being one example among several — and a single contact may reach out through more than one of them over time. Attributes determine whether the employee can pull up that contact’s first name mid-conversation on any channel, reference a stored email, check a custom field like RSVP status, or write new information back as the conversation unfolds. Having an attribute available does not mean the employee can do whatever it wants with it — each one carries three independent permissions.
Grant Read and Update only for attributes this specific employee actually needs. A support employee does not need write access to a sales-qualification field — giving it access anyway only raises the odds of an accidental bad update.

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Read, Share, and Update are not the same thing

Attributes tab permissions
Read is required for the other two — you cannot turn on Share or Update without Read also being on. Toggle Read off, and the whole attribute switches off with it.

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Why Share matters for privacy

Say you track a contact’s plan tier, lead status, or an internal pricing note as an attribute. You can leave Read on — so the employee can use that value in its own logic, deciding how to route a conversation, for example — while leaving Share off, so it never says the value out loud. If a contact asks directly, “what plan am I on?”, and Share is off, the employee says it does not have that information, even though it actually knows the value internally. That is by design — it protects sensitive data even when the contact already suspects the attribute exists and asks for it directly.

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What Update is for

Update lets the employee capture and save new information as the conversation happens — a name, an email, a phone number, or any custom attribute, saved straight to the contact record without anyone entering it manually later. This is what makes an employee genuinely useful for lead qualification, not just answering questions. This is especially valuable on channels like Live Chat, where a visitor starts out anonymous. Give the employee Update access to name, email, and phone number, and it can turn an anonymous chat into a fully identified contact over the course of a conversation. See Update contact fields.

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Setting this up

The four system attributes — first name, last name, email, and phone number — are enabled with Read by default. Add custom attributes from your workspace settings as needed, with a short description if the name alone is not self-explanatory; that description is what helps the employee understand when and how to use it. See Read contact fields and Update contact fields for step-by-step setup.