Whether you just installed Dextr or are researching whether Dextr is right for your contact management needs, this article will give you the basics to get up and running.
To Start, What is Dextr?
Dextr is an iOS and macOS app that provides a more intelligent way to manage and clean up your personal and professional contacts. It blends the basics of your phone’s contacts app with the most useful parts of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. Even if you’ve never used a CRM before, the idea is straightforward: Dextr helps you organize both new and existing contacts by letting you record when, where, and how you met someone.
Add Context to Contacts
With Dextr, you can add searchable tags to contact profiles, set the relationships your contacts have with you and other contacts, link people to events and places to remember where you met, keep track of who introduced you, and map their connections to other people. As you make these associations, Dextr creates a visual map of your relationships so that you can quickly see how everyone is connected.
Clean Up Contacts
Dextr also makes it easy to clean up cluttered address books with tools for merging duplicate entries, identifying contacts missing phone numbers, archiving people you won’t be contacting in the future, and deleting archived contacts from your iOS contacts when you are ready to permanently remove them.
Security, Privacy, and Your Data
Dextr is a privacy-first application. This means that none of your data or information about your contacts is ever sent to us, shared with third parties, or sold to anyone. All data stays on your devices and in your own iCloud account. Dextr also never deletes contacts from your iCloud without making sure that you know ahead of time that an action will do so.
Import and Sync Your Contacts
Dextr can be used as a standalone CRM without importing your iOS contacts. However, the app is most useful when you import them. For the purposes of this article, we will assume that you have imported your address book.
Getting Started With Dextr
Dextr is designed to adapt to a wide range of contact-management styles, so there’s no single “right” way to use it. That said, a handful of screens and features will become part of your everyday workflow. We’ll walk through those below.
Dextr Home Screen
When you first open the app, you will be directed to the Home Screen. This is the central hub for quick actions and helpful insights about your contacts. As you use Dextr, this screen will become more informative based on the actions you have taken within the app. Over time, you’ll see scheduled reminders, upcoming events, recently added contacts and places, and other useful details.
Settings, Support, and Social Graph
On iPhone
On an iPhone, at the very top of the Home screen, you will see three icons. From left to right, they are a gear icon, a question mark icon, and an icon of three interconnected dots in the shape of an inverted triangle.
- The gear icon will take you to Dextr’s settings. This is where you can customize the app, make edits to existing tags and relationship types, and find contacts that you have previously archived.
- The question mark icon will open a menu containing various ways to contact us for support and feedback. We want to hear from you, so do not hesitate to reach out.
- The three interconnected dots icon will open your Social Graph, a visual representation that grows as you set relationships between your contacts and define the relationships they have with each other.
On Mac
Settings can be found at the very top of your screen under the “Dextr” menu item, and support can be found under the “Help” menu. The Social Graph can be found in the menu along the left side of the application.
Dextr A.I.
Moving downward on the Home screen on any device, under the “Home” heading, you will find one of the app’s most helpful features: Dextr A.I. It is an intelligent, on-device analysis tool that helps you sort who you want to keep in your contacts from who you don’t, while building out your Social Graph by assisting with defining relationships among the people who matter to you.
As you use the app, Dextr A.I.’s suggestions go even further by helping you quickly match new contacts to the Events and Places you create, identify people you might want to stay in touch with, set relationships between contacts, and much more. If you add new contacts with the native iPhone Contacts app or bump phones to share contact details, Dextr A.I. will notice the new entries and help you set context so that you can easily recall them later.
Pro-Tip: If you have thousands of contacts that you want to organize quickly, you can bulk-select contacts from the “Contacts” page to archive them, set tags and relationships, and more.
Add New
Just below Dextr A.I., you will find buttons for quickly creating some of the app’s most useful items and features.
- Contact: As the name suggests, this is where you can create a new contact. If you have sync enabled, contacts that you add here will also be added to your Apple contacts.
- Business Card: If you are on a device that supports Apple Intelligence, use this button to scan and extract information from a business card to add a new contact.
- Event: With Dextr, you can create an Event entry and link people you meet to it. Using Events will help you remember where and how you met someone and lets you see everyone you connected with at a particular occasion. An event can be anything from a business conference to a birthday party to a casual night out with friends.
- Journal Entry: Use this feature to save a note about a moment you had with a contact. Journal Entries can be used to remember details from a call, email, text, meeting, gifts given or received, or for any other purpose you have.
- Reminder: This is a quick way to set a one-time or recurring reminder regarding a contact. With “Stay in Touch” recurring reminders, you can get notified to reach out as often as you’d like. When you initiate a call or text from within the app, Dextr will see that you made contact and restart the reminder from that moment. When a reminder is triggered, you will receive a push notification to let you know. Future, current, and overdue reminders are also displayed on the Home screen.
- Place: Create a new Place when you want to associate people with it. Places can be anywhere you want to associate with people, such as locations where you’ve met someone or where someone works.
- Tag: Creating a new Tag allows you to group people under any context you can think of, such as interests, sales funnels, personality traits, etc.
Insights
As the name implies, this section provides further insights about your address book, such as tools for merging duplicates and viewing statistics and charts about shared attributes.
Places
At the bottom of the Home screen, you’ll see the “Places” section, which shows the locations linked to your contacts, such as addresses or places where you’ve noted meeting someone. Opening a Place will show you everyone associated with it.
Recommended Workflow
When you are just getting started, we recommend starting with Dextr A.I. Not only does it help you quickly get started cleaning up your contacts, but it’s also a great way to learn what Dextr has to offer. Be sure to allow notifications from the Dextr app so that Dextr A.I. can let you know when it has new suggestions for you. If you want to move faster, check out the bulk selection and editing functionality on the Contacts page.
Feedback and Support
Now that you have an overview of the basics, please don't hesitate to reach out to Support with any questions or concerns. Your feedback is welcome and can help direct future updates to the app.