Adding Contacts to Customer Record by First Name and Last Name fields?

This is a small thing, but somewhat of a hassle. When you enter a new Customer, at the bottom of the page in the Contact tab it only has a field for "Name" for the Contact you would like to add to a Customer record. When you do this, in the Contact record, only the "Name" field gets filled out, and the "First Name" and "Last Name" fields are left blank.

Now usually that is not a big deal, but we send out event confirmation emails from Netsuite, and to personalize the email we use the <NLFIRSTNAME> code. Our problem is that when entering a Contact at the same time that we are entering a new Customer, we have to then double back to the Contact record after we've saved the record to fill in the "First" and "Last" name fields manually in the Contact record so that this works.