Portal ID: 426544
Feature: Conversations Visitor Identification API (v3)
Subscription: Enterprise
ISSUE SUMMARY
We are using the Visitor Identification API to identify logged-in users
of our web app (dev.247software.com) in the HubSpot chat widget.
For an EXISTING contact, identification works perfectly — both the first
and all subsequent messages in the conversation are correctly attributed
to the contact.
For a NEW visitor (email that is NOT yet a contact in HubSpot):
- The FIRST message is identified (the visitor’s email shows correctly).
- The SECOND messages in the SAME conversation show as “Unknown visitor”.
- The Contacts panel on the ticket shows “Contacts (0)” — no contact
This contradicts the documentation, which states the first/last name
“will be set on the contact record in HubSpot after the chat begins if
it’s a new contact created by the Visitor Identification API.” We expected
HubSpot to auto-create the contact for the new visitor, but it is not
being created, and the visitor falls back to “Unknown” after message 1.
WHAT WE HAVE VERIFIED / IMPLEMENTED (per docs)
- loadImmediately: false is set before the HubSpot script loads.
- A valid identification token is generated on our backend via
POST https://api.hubapi.com/visitor-identification/v3/tokens/create
(token decoded: aud=426544, valid email/firstName/lastName, 12h expiry).
- window.hsConversationsSettings is set with identificationEmail +
identificationToken BEFORE calling window.HubSpotConversations.widget.load().
- The token is set on every page load (cached up to 9h, under the 12h limit).
- Private app scope: conversations.visitor_identification.tokens.create.
WHAT WE NEED HELP WITH
1. Why is a new (non-existing) contact NOT being auto-created by the
Visitor Identification API when the chat begins, as the docs describe?
2. Why does the second message fall back to “Unknown visitor” while the
first is identified, for new visitors?
3. Is any additional portal/chatflow configuration or scope required for
HubSpot to auto-create contacts from identified visitors?
Hey @PMankar,
Welcome to the Community!
It sounds like you’ve reviewed the API docs below -- are you able to confirm your payload matches the fields/tokens shown in the examples there?
I’d also love to loop in some of our Top Contributors to see if they’ve run into this before:
Hey @evaldas, @Anton, @MichaelMa -- do you have any suggestions for this one?
Thanks in advance!
Sam, Community Manager