The Scenario
It's 4 PM on a Thursday and your support team goes live Monday morning. You've just finished the CRM migration and the output is an Excel workbook — 150 rows, columns for email, phone, full name, company, and a language code. Every one of those people needs to exist as a Respond.io contact before the team opens their first shift.
The bad version:
- Open Respond.io, click "Add Contact," fill in the five fields for row 1, save, and go back to the workbook for row 2.
- Discover partway through that several phone numbers are in the wrong format and Respond.io is rejecting them — so now you're also fixing E.164 formatting mid-import.
- Finish 40 contacts, realize there's no good way to track which ones succeeded, and start a second worksheet to log them manually.
Nobody hired you to be a data entry clerk the Thursday before a launch. The team needs a clean contact list in Respond.io — not a partially-done one padded with apologies about phone formats.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Respond.io integration it creates contacts for you — no API docs, no manual entry.
Read the CustomerImport tab in Excel (A=email, B=phone, C=name) and create each person as a Respond.io contact, logging the contact ID or error message in column D
What You Get
- A Respond.io contact created for each row in the workbook.
- Column D populated with the new contact ID for successful rows.
- Rows that error get the error message in column D instead — bad phone format, duplicate email, missing required field — so you can find and fix them without guessing.
- The rest of the workbook is untouched.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Phone numbers are not in E.164 format
For each row in the CustomerImport tab where column B starts with a 10-digit number, prepend +1, then create a Respond.io contact using columns A through C and write the contact ID or error in column D
Company names have trailing spaces or mixed casing
In the CustomerImport tab, trim whitespace and title-case column C (company name), then create a Respond.io contact for each row using A=email, B=phone, C=name and log the contact ID or error in column D
Only create contacts where email column is not blank
Create a Respond.io contact for every row in the CustomerImport tab where column A (email) is not empty, using A=email, B=phone, C=name. Write the contact ID or skip reason in column D.
Full kill chain — normalize, deduplicate, create, and log errors in one shot
In the CustomerImport tab: trim column C, normalize column B phone numbers to E.164, skip rows where column A is blank or appears more than once in the tab, create a Respond.io contact for each remaining row, and write the result in column D
The pattern is to ask for normalization and creation together — one prompt handles both.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your customer migration workbook, then ask it to create Respond.io contacts from your rows. See also: Bulk Add Internal Notes to Respond.io Contacts and the Respond.io overview.