Contacts Not Updating

[DStone1]

I am in desperate need of a solution to a rather simple problem. This is causing hours of additional manual work, that should not be needed.

As a School, we are legally required to hold contact details for both the Mother and Father. So, on our application forms, we ask for details for both parents.

The person who completes the form has their details automatically updated, and the 2nd parents details go through a workflow to create a contact and associate them to the deal.

However, if the 2nd parent already exists in HubSpot, no updates or associations will occur. I then have to go through each of our thousands of applications, one by one, and update them.

Surely HubSpot has a find and update feature, rather than only just a create feature?

[JWingate2]

Hi @DStone1 ,

Maybe we can solve the issues on the form level and create associations from that. Would love to talk more through this because I don't want to give you a "here's the solution" without knowing the process more.

Would you be willing to give more details like, the workflow on here and form details here or would it be easier to connect on a zoom meeting?

[DStone1]

HubSpot forms only uses contacts or company properties. So, we have created contact properties called 'Parent 2 First Name', 'Parent 2 Email Address' etc. The workflow I created looks for these properties and creates a new contact using the details (simply matching 'Parent 2 First Name' to 'First Name').

However, if the value in 'Parent 2 Email Address' already exists in another contact, for example, when they have completed an enquiry form weeks prior, the contact doesn't update and the workflow shows an error. 

I need an option that, in essence, looks to see if the value in 'Parent 2 Email Address' already exists, and if so, update that contact, OR, if it doesn't exist, create a new contact.

[TomM2]

Hey @DStone1 sounds like you have the guts of the solution already, I would have recomended that workflow too. 

One extra tool which might help is a third party association tool for associations in workflows. This might be able to help you take the second parent names and associate them with the existing records. 

https://hapily.com/associ8 

[DStone1]

Thank you for the reassurance, but the workflow only half works, so in my books, it doesn't work!

Associ8 only helps if we want to associate a record, but it doesn't update details. For example, Dad might submit an enquiry form in January 2023 and his mobile number ends in 123. Mum then submits an application form in September 2023, including Dad's details in the 2nd parent proprties, and Dad's number has changed and now ends in 456.

Associ8 will be able to find the record and associate it to the deal, but it won't update his mobile number.

Hence I need an update function.

[TomM2]

You're absolutely right, I didn't think that through fully. So, one workaround might be to have a record for the "family". If you have custom objects this would be great, but alternatively this could be a company record. So each contact in the same family becomes associated with the same "company" record. Then, you could have company properties for "parent 1 name", "parent 1 phone", "parent 2 name", "parent 2 phone" etc. 
You could then use associ8 to associate the contacts with the family records. 

You could then copy values from the "family" associated record into the contacts. It becomes tricky where you need to define which one is parent 1 or parent 2. Might be worth having a dropdown in the contacts to define this too, so if they're created by your initial workflow they get set as parent 2. If they're manually created it becomes a lot more difficult again, ideally there would be a binary option to define someone as a "mom" or a "dad" but I'd imagine a mam or a dad isn't always applicable to families. 
Thinking out loud anyway! If you can define a parent 1 and 2, then having an associated record for family data would be the solution here! 

[DStone1]

Thank you for the suggestion - it's given me a few ideas, but I don't think it will work in the long term.

Parent 1 won't always be parent 1, and this is annoyingly common where families have multiple children. As a school, we run from reception - Year 13, and so have a lot of siblings. Mum may complete the application form for child 1, and then dad will do it for child 2 a year later. So the 'Parent 1' drop down will change, and then the info contained in the company will be wrong and I can just see it being a big mess of details.

Is there seriously no way to just update details? It's probably one of the most basic features in the CRM, and I am really surprised HubSpot doesn't have this... well, actually, I'm not. HubSpot lacks so many basic features it's almost pushed me to quit the contract.

[TomM2 · Accepted solution]

The issue here isn't updating property values, that's easily done through either "copy property value" or "set property value" workflow action. The issue really is associating that action with an "unrelated" contact. The workflow will trigger on contact 1, but you want it to update contact 2. So you would basically need a way to say look for a contact with a specific value and update that one. 

It's definitely possible, but you'd likely need to do it through custom code within a workflow to search the CRM based on a value and return a record.