I’m trying to build a chat bot that collects information about a contact and then sends an email notification to Sales. Basically just an “interactive contact form”.
In the chat flow, I’m updating contact properties such as “City”, “Phone” and of course “Email”. At the end I manually enroll the contact in my workflow to send the notification.
In the email sent by the workflow, I can of course reference the contact properties I just set or updated. Unfortunately, I run into an issue:
If a contact already exists with the email provided, the “new” contact created by the chat flow is automatically merged with the existing contact, but any existing properties that was collected in the chat are not overwritten.
So if you use the chat bot two times, the first time will work fine and the email notification will include the correct information. The second time it’ll include the same information as the first.
Is there any way to send an email notification referencing the actual conversation object and what the contact answered there, or to control in detail how the contacts are merged?
If you’re sending this externally to the person that completed the chat, I can’t find a way to include that in the email. However, if you’re sending this internally, you could use the thread ID and take that HubSpot user to the actual conversation with a link.
Hi Josh! Thanks for your reply. In this case, I do want to send it to an external email adress unfortunately. Regardless I think it would make sense to be able to update contact properties through the chat bot and not prioritize the older property values when merging two records.
I upvoted an idea to have mroe granular control over record merging which I suppose is what I’d need in this case.
Hi @leohafs_1,
When a duplicate contact’s property values automatically merge with an existing contact, the primary record is prioritised. Meaning, the merged contact’s record will show the property values such as ‘City’ and ‘Phone’ from the initial primary record. Exceptions can be found here. There is no way to configure merge settings in your system. I recommend upvoting this idea to be able to choose which properties you’d like to keep when merging records.
If you are sending the transcript to a member of your internal team, you can add a new action at the end of the chatflow called ‘Send to team member’ (see photo below) and assign it to the contact owner (a conversation-based workflow is required) or to a specific user.
Hi Sarah! Thanks for your reply. In this case, I’d like to send the notification to an email address that is not a HubSpot user unfortunately.
I’ve upvoted the idea and hoping for more granular control over merging records in the future then
