In the Nue Self-Service API, a Contact represents an individual person associated with a Customer. While the Customer object represents an organization or account, Contacts represent the people within that organization who interact with your services.

In self-service environments, Contacts are particularly important as they can:

1. Serve as the primary billing and shipping individual.

2. Serve as the individual user identities that authenticate to your portal

3. Provide personalized experiences based on role and permissions

4. Enable targeted communications to specific individuals

5. Allow for role-based access to features and information

In Nue,

• Every Contact must be associated with a Customer through the customerId field

• A single Customer may have multiple Contacts representing different stakeholders

• Contacts have individual email addresses that can serve as login identifiers

• Like Customers, Contacts don't sync to Salesforce until an order is placed