Hi @EricHirsh!
Thanks for your thoughtful response and for addressing a lot of what has been festering over the years of waiting for a fix, here. I will try to respond point by point, as we are part of the community who would really benefit from having the capacity to turn off auto-contact creation within the Conversations Inbox.
Your interpretation:
- Yes, I believe that is the correct way to frame the issue. When a team email is connected to a conversations inbox, any email received by that team email address appears in the Conversations Inbox and a contact is automatically created in the CRM. There are currently no settings available to adjust when someone is created (whether that be rules based on domain, a manual toggle, a checkbox per conversation that is opened, etc.). Any email that comes through that is not filtered out as spam creates a contact, point blank, even if they are on the account-wide “Never Log” list. Even HubSpot notifications that need to hit a team inbox create new contacts (and if we mark them as spam, the team will then never receive those notifications). The problem is so pervasive that we have actually taken most of our team emails back out of the Conversations Inbox tool after doing an entire ramp-up and rollout a year ago. It is tedious to rely on email client capacity here for shared inboxes, but it’s better than what this functionality resulted in for our CRM and its data.
The customer camps:
- We fall into this camp, 100%. The team email that sees the majority of the issues related to this post is our sales@ email address. This email address is intended to catch a lot of information from our customers and our partners (specifically things like purchase orders, vendor quotes, and requests from customers who don’t have a designated sales rep at our company). When messages are coming from those folks, it works well. The email thread is associated with the Contact we want and (while we’d love to be able to edit associations directly in the inbox - this is a different conversation) makes it easy to update basic contact information from within the Inbox.
- However, this email address is also overloaded with spam. Some true spam (phishing emails, etc.) and some just cold outreach from other companies looking to sell us on a service. While I’m sure some things are caught by the spam filters, we incessantly see contacts created for inumerable amounts of both of the above. Even for email address that should fall under our “Never Log” criteria (like “gmail.com”), contacts are still created. Because of that, our Contact object is overloaded with useless and cumbersome records that take a lot of manual time to clean up.
- We also fall into this camp, some of the time. Because the team inbox where we primarily see this issue (sales@) is also meant to be for cold outreach from potential customers who find us online or hear about us through word of mouth, we get email messages that are important and need to be addressed, but don’t always turn out to be valuable or the right fit. It would be great to have an initial back and forth with these potential customers before the system creates them for us. The other two aspects that we see that I think fit here are:
- This team inbox is also where our sales reps forward POs that are sent to them directly, or where other potential customers are referred if they do outreach to someone ill-equipped to help them, because the team that manages the Inbox is who will be helping with those things. It is very common that one of our users forwards a purchase order to sales@ or even copies sales@ into an email thread, saying, “I’m copying this team and they can help you.” Every single time that happens, a contact for one of our registered HubSpot users is created. Despite having added them to the never log list AND despite them already being a user. Because of this, we had to create a workflow long ago that automatically deletes them every morning and every afternoon.
- Secondarily, we are a B2B company, but we offer some community programs in partnership with other companies that sometimes put us in touch with individual consumers. We have a support email address designated specifically to address any issues the individuals may experience with our community program, as we want to make it easy for them to reach out. We also want to track these issues in HubSpot (via Tickets) so that we can evaluate our process and offerings to be better in the long-run. However, we don’t want individual consumers to be added as Contacts. We want to receive their outreach, we want a ticket to be created, and we want to resolve their problem, but we are fine to manually associate the company (or use any number of other means to make that association) and we don’t want that individual contact record created.
- I’m sure there is a third aspect to this if and when the problem is resolved, as it’d be great to be able to manage other types of conversations in the Conversations Inbox without it creating contacts. Some that come to mind are procurement needs (if we want to receive all RFP notifications to a shared inbox and have that information living in a single system - HubSpot - so we don’t have to click between an email client and HubSpot for different team inbox needs, but don’t want a contact created for every automated notification we receive) and other basic notifications (like submission confirmations, registration confirmations, shipping notifications, etc.) that need to go to a team (for example, events@)) but that we don’t want to generate new contacts. This isn’t the core of our needs, it’s just some additional use-cases I’ve surmised in the last two minutes while thinking this through.
Visitors vs. Contacts:
I don’t dislike this idea. And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not sure I have a perfect solution for the infrastructure of all of this on your end, but to be fair to us as the consumers, that’s not our responsibility. What I will say is that having the capacity to manually (or via automation, set parameters, or whatever else) identify when a Conversation turns into a Contact, similar to Lead Stages or even the way the new Leads object is intended to function, would be a game-changer. If this takes the form of “visitors” vs. “contacts,” that’s fine. And again, I don’t understand your limitations on the backend, but I would advocate that it’s not an object, at all. Or - if it has to be - that the object is “Conversations” and that’s all it is. We want the capacity to decide when:
- An email is spam, and will be blocked from then forward (which we can currently do)
- An email is important, but merely a notification/informative/non-contact driven message and therefore shouldn’t become one
- An email is a potential customer, but may not need to turn into a Contact just yet (though I care least about this, as any valid outreach can become a contact that can be deleted later and we’re okay with that, this is just wish-list granularity)
- An email is from a valid sender whom we either already have or want to be a Contact in our CRM (at which point we can click “create contact” if they aren’t already)
In summation:
The most user-friendly solution that I’ve come up with is that “create contact” button, maybe with a toggle to control whether it happens automatically or not within individual Team Inboxes (meaning we have to click that button to do it, or for every email it just happens, sectioned out by team email address). Being able to stop spam, our own users, and basic notifications like shipments, from HubSpot, etc. from creating new contacts constantly would be huge. Thanks for reading all of this and I hope it’s helpful for you and your team!
Best,
Cody