A contact is what a requestor sees when they need to reach you. Each one points at something: a workgroup, a team member, or nothing at all.
Point at a workgroup where you can
A contact pointing at a workgroup keeps working when the people change. The workgroup's name follows it, and its members come along automatically — so the night-shift handover is not also a contact-details edit.
A contact pointing at a member takes that person's name and job title from their profile. It does not publish their email or phone unless the contact says it may.
A contact pointing at nothing is free-standing detail: a shared mailbox, an answering service, a number that is not anybody's.
How a requestor reaches each kind
A contact pointing at nothing is used outside AOG HUB. It is listed on your organization and on every station that inherits it, and it appears in the provider directory and in search results exactly as you typed it — a requestor reads the number and dials it, or takes the address and emails it, from their own phone and mail client. Nothing about that exchange comes back here: no thread, no history, no sign that it was delivered or read. That is the right shape for a hotline or a shared mailbox nobody signs in as.
A contact pointing at a member can also be reached inside AOG HUB. Everything above still applies, and the platform knows who is behind the row: a requestor sees whether that person is Online, Away or Reachable right now, and gets a Message button on your station page that opens a chat with them. No address is exchanged, and both organizations keep the thread, its attachments and its read state. Whatever email and phone you published sit beside it.
A contact pointing at a workgroup is listed as a desk and reached on the details you give it. A chat cannot yet be routed into a workgroup, so the phone number and mailbox on a workgroup contact are what a requestor will use today — give it both. Point contacts at workgroups anyway wherever the desk outlives the person: the listing stays correct through every staff change, and in-platform messaging follows when routing does.
Nothing is published that you did not publish. A contact you want to keep internal can be switched out of the provider directory, and a member's own email and phone are handed over only when the contact says they may — resolved fresh every time somebody looks, so a number that changes is never frozen into your listing.
Positions
Every contact answers for a position from the platform catalogue — AOG Desk, Maintenance Control, Duty Engineer, Spares, and so on. The catalogue is shared across the platform on purpose: it is what lets a requestor ask "who do I call for an AOG at LTBA" and get a comparable answer from every provider.
A workgroup contact needs no position. The workgroup already names what it answers for, so asking again would be asking the same question twice.
If you need a position the catalogue does not cover, you can give the contact a label of your own — but a requestor cannot search on it. If you keep needing one, ask us to add it properly.
Station inheritance
Contacts exist at two levels: your organization's roster, and each station's own.
A station inherits your organization's contacts unless it defines its own for the same position. Define a Duty Engineer at IST and IST shows that one instead of the company-wide one; define nothing and it shows yours. Matching is on the position, never on the label text.
Each station also has a master switch for whether it inherits at all.