Tickets Displaying Other Ticket emails

[RichardG]

Hi there

I was hoping someone could help me. We create multiple tickets for certain companies and individuals and being able to see all of these from the contact screen is very helpful.

However, we do not want to see emails, notes and other details of tickets on other tickets activity windows as it confuses matters. Is there a way to turn this function off?

To be clear, we would like to see all the activity history against the relevant company and contact records but not on other tickets

Any help would be awesome

Thanks in advance

[Jenny]

HI @RichardG,

If the ticket is associated with a contact or company, there is no way to limit the associations by ticket.

Thank you,
Jenny

[RichardG]

Shame

Thanks

[Cait_1]

I don’t think the answer you got before is entirely accurate. But I could also be misunderstanding what you’re saying.

My team has been noticing when they create tickets, we’re getting unrelated activity from the contact or company associated to the ticket, but the check box on the ticket creation form to include that info was unchecked, so how was that info populating?

Example:

We create a ticket for Sandra at Hubspot. We then email Sandra about something completely different than the ticket. But when you look at the ticket, that unrelated email shows up in the ticket record.

If that is your problem, then when you’re sending an email to a contact associated to the company the ticket is for, creating a note for the company or contact associated to the ticket, basically do anything with the contact or company associated to the ticket, there’s a little box at the bottom of the entry that says “Associated with x Records” and it’s a drop down. If you check the drop down out, you’ll see it trying to automatically associated the next activity on the contact or company to the most recent ticket that was created.

[James-Preseem]

Cait

I experienced this same behavior earlier this year and had a very long and detailed discussion about this with a support rep at hubspot. It was and continues to cause me a problem because when you put this problem together with the fact that any message reply to any of the cross associated tickets will cause them to reopen…its a big pain.

The explaination I received explains why it happen technically, but it is far from ideal and is completely incompatible with a ticket system in my opinion. To summarize…

Putting aside the concept of a ticketing system for Customer support purposes and considering only the concepts of CRM from a conversations point of view:

• Thinking about conversations, they have an association with various objects; contacts, companies, deals, etc…
• If I am thinking purely about this from the perspective of CRM, I want to be able to see all communications for a company or a contact when I view that contact or that company. So to do that there has to be an association between the objects.
• When you “Reply to all” to a conversation the back end of hubspot searches for objects associated with recipient objects not already associated with that conversation and associates them.
• By doing this, nothing gets missed and the CRM side of things will show an accurate representation of what conversations various contacts are engaged in.

Add in the concept of a ticket as an object that is associated with a conversation.

This is a quote from support

• The undesired associations are being made because the customer is using the “Reply All” functionality to respond to the Email/Ticket. When this happens, the back-end looks up the last 5 tickets for each contact included in the thread and associates them to the email engagement. This means that the last 5 deals, contacts, companies, and the ticket are associated with the email engagement that’s being created at this point.

Now from a deal, contact, company point of view having an association makes sense. You want to know what the various contacts are engaged in. From a service ticket perspective this is completely counter intuitive and is completely sideways in my opinion. A ticket represents a specific engagement/issue/transaction of ideas and events that are indepdendent of one another unless otherwise specificed. It is completely logical that there is separate conversations between two people about two different things and that those two conversations are independent of one another. i.e.

Ticket 1 has conversation 1 (service rep A + customer contact A)

Ticket 2 has conversation 2 (service rep A + customer contact A)

Just because Service Rep A & Customer Contact A are conversing with one another regarding two separate tickets (1&2) doesnt mean that the conversations are related and should automagically be associated with the other ticket. Conversations should associated with tickets should not be subject to the `search and associate` functionality that seems to be built into the system.

It is my understanding that this behavior is tied to the 'Reply to All` functionality, and that the only way to really avoid this is to make sure that that the associations are correct before you reply to all and if they arent remove the incorrect associations before hand…OR to simply reply and manually add in the addition recipients everytime. Both of which are unacceptable.

In general HubSpot does not see a ticket as being different than any other object from the point of view of their association contact tracking model. The problem is that is completely counterintuitive from a service /support ticket perspective. I spend a non trivial amount of time chasing down tickets that have incorrectly reopened because of incorrect associations. Reading endless threads to determine what is actually associated with what and doing the manual task of undoing the automatic associations that the back end feels are necessary. If you have multiple tickets open with the same groups of contacts, expect this cross association (contamination) to occur. The system making unilatereral undocumented decisions about what is associated to what may be a feature but its not a feature that considered the use case of service / support ticketing especially well in my opinion.

James

[JCrowe]

James your email is very well written and explains the problem in a way that is very clear and concise. I do take issue with HS saying it’s only driven by he Reply-All when emailing. I created tickets this morning with ONE Contact, and ONE Company expeting a one to one relationship. No Emails used in this use case at all. What I found when looking back was Hub-Spot displaying Notes and Emails from last MONTH that had absolutely nothing to do with what I was documenting when I created my tickets. This is totally un-acceptable! IMHO, HS is making a total mess of our ticketing system.. We NEVER saw this sort of behaviour with Salesforce or SugarCRM…

[James-Preseem]

Hi JCrowe,

Since writing this i’ve learned a great deal about the reasons why this happens and should really write an update to the original post to include some of those details.

One thing that I’ve dug into extensively was the use of the HubSpot Chrome Extenstion for Gmail. If you or your users are using this, this can cause a rediculous amount of problems when the Default associations config includes “Tickets”.

How this little gem of a feature works is not really something that makes any sense to me really.

In sort, if you are using HubSpot sales extension for Gmail/chrome AND you have the default associations set to include “Tickets” and your users are sending and replying from email out of Gmail…you are likely pulling your hair out trying to understand the endless mess of cross associations.

Here is a quote from the extensive support ticket that I logged about the behavior of this “Feature”…

"

For some reason, the HubSpot Sales Chrome Extension has 2 major issues

When replying to a message that is associated with a ticket, and default associations include tickets,

1. it is unable detect or preserve the existing association with the ticket that initiated the thread in the first place
2. It selects a series of unrelated tickets that include tickets that are old, closed and are completely unrelated in any way other than they they include the same company contact and sending contact."

"

Having continued the conversation for some time it was explained that the auto-association function that is present in the chrome extension is different from how it is done in the CRM. This appears to be the case with the Outlook extension as well. I.e it behaves different than the auto association that exists in HubSpot CRM and it is also different from Chrome extension as well.

I late found out that the issue described in #2 above does not attempt to associate the email reply with the ticket that originated the thread. What it actually does when auto association of tickets is enabled is that it automatically associates the conversation with the first 3 tickets that exist for the first contact in the two line. It does this regardless of whether the ticket is 5 years old and closed or whether it was opened 10 minutes ago.

The response I received from HS goes like this…

“The auto-association behavior between sending emails in the CRM records page and sending emails in the extension is different. It is WAD that those three tickets are automatically selected as they are all associated to the recipient. That being said, we are actively working on aligning the association behavior between the CRM and extension, which hopefully will help make it less confusing.”

WAD for those who don’t recognize the accronym is “Working as Designed”…

In my opinion, if this is working as designed…then the design is broken. No one who has ever had to work in an organization with a service ticket system would ever have designed something like this.

As mentioned in the comments above, the behavior of CRM mail auto association is different than what occurs within the sales extension that is external to the app.

In my experience simpler is better

• If you have a support team or CS team using HubSpot ticketing…choose an interface and stick with that interface to interact with the customer.
  • Email: I generally recommend people send and receive email from the ticket interface in CRM or the HubSpot inbox. This can be difficult with mobile users and different people in different roles with different working preferences.
• If your users insist on using the Gmail or the chrome sales extension, advise them to not select the Tickets in the default association section of the extension configuration.

This will result in the email being associated with the contacts and the company but not the ticket. This is not ideal and it does create addtional work in that it would still require manual association of the ticket to make sure it gets associated with the correct ticket. However, it does eliminate the havoc caused by the cross association of multiple email and the apparent random reopening of ancient completely unrelated tickets.

At the end of the day, sending, receiving and replying to email from within the ticket is still the most consistent option in my opinion for keeping the email thread, ticket, contacts, and company together as they should be.

Thankfully there is a global setting for this that can be set at a company level that will override the end user settings for the sales extension.

[JCrowe]

Thank you for the courtesy of replying James;

Once again, very helpful.

Happily we don’t use Gmail here so the Chrome extension isn’t a problem.

I have tried the Outlook Sales Tool, and if get in a hurry to reply to an email from a Customer, then all bets are off.. You’ve shotgunned another bunch tickets because of the poor WAD! So I, like you, only answer emails in the Browser HS interface.. Over twenty years of using Outlook is a hard habit to break though.. Adding the Ticket number to the Subject only seems to benefit the customer.. It seems to have no effect on maintianing associations to the proper ticket much like it would in SugarCRM for example.. SalesForce takes a little more effort in that you need to have the Case / Sequence number in the Subject AND the body, but you still get to use your Email client..

This conversational behavior is just plain wrong.. Having to wade through all that old unlrelated **bleep** to try and assist a customer with their ONE problem a given ticket was created for is pretty rediculous.. Sorry, need to get off my soapbox now and try to clean up some more tickets. Although as you described, the crapola will be back.. <Sigh>

Oh, I guess I missed the setting you spoke of, I took a quick look around before this reply and nothing stood out for me:

“Thankfully there is a global setting for this that can be set at a company level that will override the end user settings for the sales extension.”

Thanks again

John

[James-Preseem]

With respect to that setting…
Settings - Data management - Objects - Activities - email log & track…
[image: image.png]

[JCrowe]

Thanks James… Looks like that is geared to the Outlook Extension.. Not something I’ve talked up with my users, and I don’t intend to!

[Berangere]

Hi @JCrowe,
I’m sorry to hear about your experience regarding this.
I would like to apologize for the frustration, data issues, and business impact this has caused.
So that I understand exactly what’s happening here, I’d like to ask clarifying questions:
1. Is the issue that you are getting activities (like notes and emails) logged on a contact and company record that are retroactive and were therefore created before the ticket was associated to the contact, is that right, please?
2. How are you sending the emails? Via HubSpot? Via your personal email?
3. Do you use the HubSpot Sales extension? Which options in the settings are ticked?
The more info, screenshots (without sensitive/confidential information), and details you can provide, the better the Community can assist.
There has been an update made and you can see on this article “Associate activities with records” that you now have an option to choose the timeframe within which the record’s past activities will be associated with the new record.
I’d like to also ask some of our Top Experts on the subject: Hi @HubDoPete, @FCorbaci and @Jonas_De_Mets do you have suggestions to help @JCrowe, please?
Thanks a lot and have a great day!
Best,
Bérangère

[JCrowe]

BerangerL said:
1. Is the issue that you are getting activities (like notes and emails) logged on a contact and company record that are retroactive and were therefore created before the ticket was associated to the contact, is that right, please?

+ I Created several tickets in the HS interface with “Create Ticket”. When I came back to add info, there was data, Notes and Emails in the Activity that were created at least a month ago for different customers and Contacts.
Tickets should be a one to one relationship. I should be seeing that information that ONLY pertains to that ticket and it’s ultimate resolution.
2. How are you sending the emails? Via HubSpot? Via your personal email?

+ For these tickets I didn’t use email. As I said, I used the “Create Ticket”
3. Do you use the HubSpot Sales extension? Which options in the settings are ticked?
+ I’ve tried the extension. It makes an even bigger mess of things even when taking the time to select the associations before sending. I’ve taken to answering Customers via the HubSpot Email interface.

If you’re going to say this is Working As Designed, then the design is greatly flawed. Trying to solve a customers issue is a one to one thing in terms of managing the data around their issue.

No notes or associations should be associated to this ticket at this time

A small example of totaly un-related Activity

Another small example

[Berangere]

Hi @JCrowe,
Thanks a lot for all the detailed information.
Seeing the screenshots you shared, this will need more investigation and troubleshooting.
Therefore, since Support is included in your subscription, HubSpot Technical Support will be your best point of contact so that they can check how these associations happened.
Thanks and have a good day!
Best,
Bérangère

[KLishman5]

We are havng a similar issue over here, but it’s not activity related to the same contact or company…

We have a need to copy ourselves on tickets we’re not assigned to so we receive updates. Therefore, the activity for every ticket shows multiple conversations from entirely different contacts/companies.

Unfortunately, Sales owns the contacts, and CS doesn’t own Tech Support tickets, we only follow them. So we have to scroll through all sorts of stuff to find the actual updates for the ticket.

[abiblu]

Hi team,

After contacting HubSpot about this exact issue they pointed me to this discussion as a reference and said:

However, we are always looking to innovate for our customers. I’d encourage you to post your case in our Ideas Forum. Our product team, who monitors the forum regularly, can read your specific case and understand why this would be a helpful functionality or change. It also helps other customers facing the same issue to advocate for its implementation by upvoting on the thread as well.

Unsure why:

1) This thread is marked solved when it is clearly not solved, and;

2) I’d need to post a duplicate thread about the same issue

However, I’ve done it anyway:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Tickets-Conversations/Emails-incorrectly-associated-to-tickets-when-quot-reply-all/m-p/584280

Please upvote and let’s hope HubSpot will fix this intentionally ridiculous ticket behaviour.

Thanks