Hi everyone,
I’ve got an issue with my contacts - they often appear in the address book with the email address used as the contact name (for example, john.smith@company.com instead of John Smith).
These contacts were added over a week ago, so it’s not a matter of the algorithm not having enough time to process them yet.
I have the option enabled that should automatically replace the email with a proper first and last name based on the address, but unfortunately it often doesn’t work - even for really obvious names.
All of our team members have this option enabled as well, but the behaviour is the same for everyone.
I was expecting HubSpot to recognise the name from the email and fill in the fields automatically, but it keeps showing the full email address instead.
Has anyone else run into this? Any ideas on how to fix it or where to look for what’s going wrong?
The automation does not deduce a name based on the email address - it does so (check the screenshot you shared) based on received emails from those contacts, specifically by looking at the email body and/or signature, details here.
If there are no such received emails or if these received emails do not have signatures, it is expected behaviour that HubSpot does not populate first and last name.
Even if there are such emails, there isn’t any guarantee it’s populated.
From my observations, it seems this feature might not be working entirely as expected - I opened five random contacts in HubSpot, and four of them had a normal email signature including the sender’s first and last name. These contacts are from different companies, and their emails are properly logged in HubSpot.
@08224 AI features in general are hit and miss. As I said, sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it wont. It likely depends on the signature formatting and, as @franksteiner79 has also already pointed out, if these requirements aren’t met, the feature will definitely not work:
This feature will scan emails that are sent to your connected personal email only. It will not scan emails that are sent to a team email address.
Eligible contact properties will only be populated when the property does not have a value and has never been updated by a user in your HubSpot account. This feature will not overwrite existing contact data or create new contacts.
This feature will only scan a contact’s first email response. If the eligible contact information is not detected in the initial response, properties will not be populated, even if the contact information is included in a subsequent reply.
This feature is turned on by default. Since the setting is dependent on a user’s connected email, it cannot be globally configured for all users in the account.
There are a few caveats to how this feature behaves and what information it enriches for contacts, the most notably being:
This feature will only scan a contact’s first email response. If the eligible contact information is not detected in the initial response, properties will not be populated, even if the contact information is included in a subsequent reply.
