An essential contact in Pendo gives organization and subscription admins a way to designate the right teams at your company to receive critical communications from Pendo regarding security alerts, technical updates, privacy alerts, and legal notices. In the event that Pendo needs to communicate timely information to your organization, Pendo sends it to the essential contacts you add.
Before you begin
- Only organization admins and subscription admins can add, remove, or edit essential contact information.
- Organization admins and subscription admins each maintain a separate contact list, and neither can edit the other's entries. Subscription admins may see org contact emails suggested when adding contacts, so they can avoid duplicating the same address. For example, if the organization admin sets
securityteam@yourcompany.comfor security messages, the subscription admin must choose someone else. To change the essential contact for the organization, you must be an org admin or contact an org admin. See more in Organization users.
How essential contacts work
Essential contacts are the people you specify for receiving important notifications from Pendo. Rather than routing critical updates to individual users who may no longer be active, Pendo sends notifications to the email contacts you provide. The email can be an individual, a team inbox, mailing list, or alias.
Organization admins and subscription admins can manage four core categories: Security, Technical, Privacy, and Legal. Subscription admins with Data Sync enabled also manage a Data Sync category for sync status updates.
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Security | Notifications related to vulnerabilities, breaches, and other security concerns |
| Technical | Alerts about outages, bugs, and technical incidents |
| Privacy | Updates about data protection, privacy compliance, and subprocessor changes |
| Legal | Contract updates and other legal notices |
Add or update essential contacts
If you are an org admin or a subscription admin, you can update the essential contacts.
- Go to Settings > Organization Settings or Subscription Settings. If you don't see these options from the settings menu, you don't have the correct permissions. See Before you begin.
- Select the Essential Contacts tab.
- Select the edit icon next to any category.
- Enter one or more email addresses for that category.
- Select the checkmark to save your changes.
There's no limit to the number of email addresses you can add per category.
Tip: Use a group distribution list (for example, security@yourcompany.com) rather than one individual’s email. Doing this ensures continuity if team members change and helps make sure the messages are sent to active team members.
Remove essential contacts
To remove a contact:
- Select the edit icon for that category.
- Select the X next to the email address you want to remove.
- Save your changes.
You can remove one or more addresses, or clear the category entirely by removing all emails and saving.
Essential contacts for Data Sync
If your subscription has Data Sync, a Data Sync essential contact category appears in subscription settings. By default, Pendo assigns this role to the person who set up Data Sync. Subscription admins can update it at any time.