# Automatically populate customer profiles
<a name="auto-pop-customer-profile"></a>

By default, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles uses the following values to search for and autopopulate a customer profile in its user interface: 
+ For voice contacts: Phone number
+ For chat contacts: Email

It autopopulates a customer profile by using the Customer Profiles flow block. To customize this behavior, use the [Set contact attributes](set-contact-attributes.md) block (see below) for the following contact attributes


| Attribute | Description | Type | JSONPath Reference | 
| --- | --- | --- | --- | 
| profileSearchKey | The name of the attribute you want to use to search for a profile.  | User-defined | Not applicable | 
| profileSearchValue | The value of the key you want to search for, such as customer name or account number.  | User-defined | Not applicable | 

For example, to search by email for chat contacts, you can set the `profileSearchKey` attribute to the `_email` search key, and provide the email value as the `profileSearchValue`. 

If you have defined custom keys in your profile objects, you can search by those search keys as well. To make sure your custom keys are searchable, see [Key definition details](object-type-mapping-definition-details.md#key-definition-details).

The following image shows how you might use these attributes in the [Set contact attributes](set-contact-attributes.md) block. 

![\[The properties page of the Set contact attributes block.\]](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/adminguide/images/customer-profiles-attributes1.png)


## Automatically associate a customer profile with a contact
<a name="cp-automatically-associate-contact"></a>

By default, agents need to manually associate a customer profile with a contact based after they've verified the customer's identity. To change this behavior to automatically associate contacts with a profile based on the phone number, see [Associate the Contact Record with one profile found using the \$1phone key in Customer Profiles](auto-associate-profile-using-phone-profile-key.md). 

If multiple profiles match a contact's phone number, the multiple matched profiles are shown to the agent. The agent needs to choose which profile to associate with the contact.