How to deal with spouses sharing emails during form submissions

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

We often will encounter fake “duplicate contacts” where a spouse has overwritten their spouses firstname due to them sharing an email address upon a new form submission. This is difficult to spot and often requires careful manual history checking of the values.

Sometimes contacts were incorrectly merged as a result.

I understand the choice for establishing email as a unique identifier but it comes with this fault that is quite common. I am reaching out to see if anyone has established any good solutions for such situations.

Thanks.

3

Hey @RLehrhaupt,

Thanks for posting in the Community!

I came across this Community post, where it seems like a similar instance was discussed. You’ll note in the Accepted Solution that there doesn’t seem to be a native way currently that would avoid these updates from occurring. But there are some potential workarounds provided by @karstenkoehler I would recommend taking a look at as a start!

I hope this helps!

Shane, Community Manager

4

Hello @RLehrhaupt,

There is indeed no way to disable field updates; you could request this from the product team here: Being able to disable automatic field updating from outside sources or forms, meetings, etc. - HubSpot Ideas - HubSpot Community

As far as workarounds go, you could:

  • Not use the actual email field on the form but a custom property, then use a tool like Koalify to merge contacts where the custom property, first and last name are identical, see below.
  • Not use the actual first and last name fields on the form, but custom properties, then establish a process where a workflow only copies the values in these custom fields into the first and last name when they’re empty, not if they already have a value. If they have a value, set up a notification to manually review.
  • Add disclaimers to the form that no shared email addresses should be used (but offer an alternative - this depends on what exactly it is you’re offering / asking for).

Personally, I prefer and would recommend Koalify, linked above. It lets you set custom deduplication rules, primary rules and will store results in custom properties that you can filter for, use in reports or within workflows: https://koalify.io/

In your case, the deduplication rule could be by company name, the primary rule that the company which has the company domain name should become the primary one.

You can install the app through the HubSpot app marketplace or through my affiliate link.

Best regards