Hi, I’m new to the HubSpot Community, though I’ve been working in the backend of HubSpot for my company for about a year and a half.
I’d love to take advantage of HubSpot’s enrichment tools, but I’ve found that the data isn’t always accurate—and in some cases, it overwrites correct information with incorrect data. For example, I’ve seen contacts located in Michigan updated to Georgia simply because their company is based in Atlanta. I’ve also run into issues with names and email fields, such as first and last names being overwritten or swapped.
Has anyone found a reliable way to use HubSpot enrichment while preventing it from overwriting existing, accurate contact data? Any advice or best practices would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!
Hey @CreedWood,
Thanks for posting in the Community!
While we wait for others to provide some shared insight, I’d like to point out the following knowledge base article:
-Manage data enrichment settings
Particularly, it may be worth reading through the following two sections:
- Configure enrichment settings
- Customize enrichment property mapping
That property mapping section, in particular, looks to provide you with customizations that would help you avoid incorrect updates to your records, like the one you mentioned above.
I hope this helps!
Shane, Community Manager
HI @CreedWood,
Enrichment will never be 100% accurate - part of using the enrichment tools is also accepting a certain ratio of contacts with wrong information.
In the enrichment settings (Settings > Data Enrichment > Mapping), you can specify that enrichment should “Fill empty values only”. In the “Settings” tab, you can select to “Overwrite incorrect enrichment values”.
These are the settings closest to what you want to achieve, I would say.
Best regards
I’d be pretty conservative with enrichment here.
“Fill empty values only” is a good start, but I’d also decide which fields enrichment is actually allowed to own. Things like a contact’s location or name can already be correct from a form, rep update, or another trusted source, so I wouldn’t let enrichment overwrite those automaticlly
For fields where enrichment is less trustworthy, I’d either use it only when the value is blank or write it to a separate property first.
That way enrichment adds data without quietly becoming the source of truth for everything
@MahdiEqbal “Fill empty values only” is the same thing as “not let enrichment overwrite” and “use it only when the value is blank”.
You’re right — I repeated the same behavior there.
The distinction I was trying to make was the separate-property case: for fields where I don’t fully trust enrichment, I’d keep the enriched value alongside the existing CRM value rather than let it become the canonical value.
Thanks for catching that.
We used to have those settings enabled as well. When I was new to my role, I thought, “Why wouldn’t we want HubSpot to correct incorrect information?” In hindsight, I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing what I did. For example, we had a contact named John Smith whose name was changed to “Smith Smith” because only “Smith” appeared before the @ in his email address.
I’m mostly curious about how HubSpot’s enrichment actually works. My understanding was that enrichment should pull from existing information found online, but more often than not, it seemed like it was guessing values based on information already stored in HubSpot.
We also use Apollo, but that has been somewhat hit-or-miss as well, since the field mapping does not always seem to work consistently.