Add Activity Associations Dropdown to Conversations

[RebeccaMudler]

We just started using conversations inboxes in May 2022. We have one inbox for Orders and one inbox for Support. We are noticing the email activity from a conversation is being associated to the conversation's contact, associated company and more than just 5 open deals in some cases. We would like to have the ability to unassociate or associate the conversation to whichever objects we choose. Right now there is no option to do so (not including the ability to connect 1 ticket). Every other object's (Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets) activities allow for this flexibility. Please make it the same for conversations.

[NLeonard6]

Upvoted!

[BWink]

Excellent idea, this would make the associations so much more useful - as it is, they're becoming white noise when a conversation is associated to everything whether it's relevant or not.

[JMcKinney7]

Necessary addition for the software to work cleanly for our company. Hopefully Hubspot will respond.

[SShiller]

The suggested feature would make the tool better.

[08976]

This will help keep the information clean and relevant. Much needed. 

[GBuss]

I like this idea!

[Jnix284]

Your idea makes sense, but I am not experiencing the same behavior and was hoping to better understand why.

For me, new messages and replies are associated to the contact and ticket (if applicable) - we can see deals, tickets, and conversations on the right sidebar, but when I look at the associations for the conversation, it is not automatically adding it to any existing deals or the company.

[RebeccaMudler]

@Jnix284 - I would ask that you go into a couple different deals and the associated company record for that contact that you see in the right pane associations of the conversation and make sure you don't have any filters set on your deal or company view in the center pane (activities). There is no way to toggle this functionality of auto-associations on or off so if it's not happening for you, would be very curious what your org setup is. Do you use custom objects? Workflows? How many users do you have? Are you using synched emails for users to be able to email out of HubSpot? We use Office 365 and have our users sync their personal inboxes and we are also using the Outlook Add-in. 

[Jnix284]

Hi @RebeccaMudler  happy to share some additional insight.

I have checked numerous deals and associated companies to test this out, the items shown in the right sidebar are associated to the contact/communication for reference, but not directly to the communication via associations.

This is the conversations inbox view, showing a conversation via an email with the sidebar information that is relevant to the contact/ticket:

From the Contact record, looking at the associations for the same email, it is only associated to the Contact and the Ticket:

If I click on Deals or Companies, it shows me the corresponding record with the option to add the association, just as I could remove it from the Contact or Ticket shown here.

To answer your questions:
No, this account has no custom objects. Yes, it has workflows, but not any that would impact this. Users just 3. Yes, synched group emails from conversations inbox and forms. Individual email synced to our individual accounts (not conversations inbox).

It isn't recommended that users sync their personal inboxes to the conversations inbox, only team emails - are you meaning just that they have their personal email connected to HubSpot via these instructions ?

From your original message and screenshot, it shows a Deal as the only association, which means the email originated from the deal and can't be removed - I'm not sure how that ties back to the conversations inbox in this case.

I've been using HubSpot inbox since it launched across numerous portals and actually haven't run into the issue with it auto-associating to everything - which is why I commented here in the first place, I was surprised to see so many who have this issue and wondering if it is due to a setting or configuration within the account already.

[MFisher5]

At the very least, there needs to be an option to turn off automatic association for conversations inboxes. We work quite a few deals with the same company at the same time, and having emails automatically associated with the past five deals creates admin work to manually associate the emails with the deals they are related to. 

[BSong]

Agreed on this! Having the ability to choose which records it associate too is a feature we sorely need. As of now, creating records from conversations assocaites it and the conversation to other records which we then have to disassociate ourselves.

Hoping to see this implemented soon!

[HTan0]

Posting this on behalf of a customer. The customer would like to be able to associate emails (both incoming and outgoing emails) to deal records from within the conversations inbox. Specifically, they want to be able to choose which deal records to associate the email to, and once associated, they want that association to stick for all additional replies to that email thread. 

In this customer’s use case, they have a number of contacts with multiple associated deals, and they often communicate with their contacts via the conversations inbox. It’s been observed that for outgoing emails (i.e. emails sent from the customer’s connected team email to their contacts), the emails only get associated to the contact record and not the deals – so they’d have to go to the contact’s record, find the email and manually associate the email to the relevant deal records after the email is sent.

For incoming emails (emails sent from the contacts to the customer’s connected team email), if a contact has more than five deals, the email gets automatically associated to the contact, the ticket that the email created, and the contact’s five recent open deals (which is also as explained here). This is a pain point for the customer too as not only is the current process to associate the emails to the correct deal records tedious, slow and prone to be forgotten, the emails also often gets associated to the wrong deal records especially if a contact has more than five open deals.

If a contact has multiple associated deals, they see emails related to all other deals on a specific deal record - in other words, a specific deal record isn’t just showing emails that are relevant to the specific deal record, but is currently cluttered with irrelevant email conversations related to all other associated deals that the contact has. This makes it very challenging for the customer to do a relevant history search of a specific deal on the deal record. In their use case, they often have to search through the emails to find relevant information to complete on the deal record, such as the quote amount, and this issue makes it difficult for them to find the relevant information for each unique deal.

The customer also communicates with their suppliers for each deal record and would also like to keep such conversations unique to each deal. However, they’ve not been able to achieve this easily for the same reason explained above.

If anyone has any workarounds to suggest for this, it would be great if you could share more details. Thank you so much!

[rh7]

Allow this also with the Outlook Add-In, see also here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Automatically-tracking-email-to-the-right-deal-of-contact/m-p/8...

[MollSmigielski]

This would be helpful, for sure...Upvoted!

[JWyatt4]

This would be awesome! definitely upvoting