HubSpot Ideas

KeyWestScott

Contacts Capitalization of Contact Fields

Sure that you all have lazy customers or even employees that when they enter their names do not capitalize their names.  

 

When sending out emails, or using personalization tokens on a page, it looks bad,

amateurish and just a poor UX to have someones name displayed as "john" instead of the first letter capitalized.

 

Needs to be a way to force or correct after the fact,  the first letter to go capitalized, on both first name and last name fields.  I realize that this isn't going to do anything for those that have two first  or last names, but this would be a great start.

 

Scott

19 Replies
Paul320
Participant | Diamond Partner

This is a great idea.  I lose a lot of time over the course of a week correcting contact records I happend across where the capitalization in incorrect.  

 

To provide some flexibility, it would be really nice to have this as a function in a workflow where we can have some control over what gets capitalized.  So, for example, if someone entered in "mcdonald" in the last name field you could instruct the workflow to update it to look for "mcd" and if found in the beginning of the string, replace it with "McD".

 

You ought to be able to apply the function to any text field property so it can be used not just for first and last names, but also titles, company name, city, etc., etc.

 

If this was available, I'd run my entire database through it and create a Workflow to enroll every new contact record.

KeyWestScott
Key Advisor

Hey, @Paul320. I'm not sure that there would be any "logic" that you could effectively implement that would take into account a compound name. I've though about it as well.  If you used a workflow, you would need to have literlly hundreds of if/then statements to account for every iteration of this.

 

Personally, I'd be content with simply a first name (but then again you get caught with compound First Names as well.. ) maryellen  - Would that be Maryellen or Mary Ellen?????

 

Scott

Paul320
Participant | Diamond Partner

Hey @KeyWestScott, Just having a function available in Workflows to capitalize the first letter of a text field (not just name fields) would be a huge step forward.  I'd be REALLY happy to get that.  But I think it is a small step forward to allow users to be able to list text substitutions if they are at the beginning of a string (mcd -> McD).  That way if I want to spend the time doing it, I can.  And if you don't, you won't.  This is no different than using a RegEx function when writing code.   It's totally doable and I'm surprised it hasn't already been done.  There's a forum post about this and a woman has created a free add-on you can install, but it's only for form submissions.  I'm going to post a link to your idea in the forum and ask folks to upvote it.  I hear you need to get north of 100 upvotes to get the attention of the HubSpot product managers.

Certemy-Malcolm
Participant

Absolutely agree there should be a system option to proper case any property inc contact names, company names, and city names. Should be smart enough to handle common quirks like MCDONALD to McDonald.

tcwir
Member

Please please please do this! 🙂 thanks

marcopolo
Participant

This would be really useful

aylalawlor
Member

Would love to see this added.

Fixing the formatting is time consuming for our team when we send out sequences, especially en mass.  

This can easily be done in excel so would like to see that option added here

Shane_Janssens
HubSpot Product Team

Hi There @KeyWestScott

 

We appreciate the idea and for the upvotes from the rest of the customers here. I will bring this idea to my team and come back to update this thread. Just for transparency it is unlikely we will make this change in this quarter so i will leave this as not currently planned for now. 

 

All the best and i will be back in touch soon.

 

Best,

Shane Janssens

PM Marketing Email

Shane_Janssens
HubSpot Product Team
 
OCWatson
Member

How's the roadmap looking for this feature? Would be really helpful. Excel can do it (the "Proper") function, but it's a huge pain to export my entire list, apply the Proper function to their first names, and reimport. 

tcwir
Member

I'm guessing this is very simple coding... please 🙂

MoreLeadsPlz
Participant

+1

elizsmith
Contributor

This would be incredibly helpful! We receive form submissions all the time where the names are lowercase or all caps.  

SDyer
Member

I have to admit the first time that I used a personalized token, I immediately regretted it because it sent out an email with the name in all caps. This was not a good thing for our CEO to see. I would really love to see this idea implemented so that we can feel comfortable using personalization tokens on a much larger scale.

OCWatson
Member

@SDyer I've had this issue too and I found a solution you can use.

 

1. Export your contact list as an Excel file

2. Insert a new column next to First Name

3. In the new column, use the =PROPER function to correctly capitalize the first names

4. Copy the new column, and Paste Special > Values directly over what you copied

5. Delete the column with inaccurate first names

6. Reimport the spreadsheet to replace all first names with the new, correctly capitalized ones

 

Hope this helps!

RKallok
Participant

I also would like to see this featured added!

Izzy_
Participant

You know, if Hubspot devs could simply have a value for First Name or Last Name Contact/Company/Deal properties as such:

 

Does not start with capital letter

 

You could simply create a workflow that adds that Contact/Company/Deal respectively to a Static List titled "Name Not Capitalized" and receive a notification to change it.

Add that Does not not start with capital letter value here:

Screen Shot 2022-08-09 at 10.56.24 am.png

Easy-peasy.

NPW
Contributor

Hello All,

 

There is the 'Format Data' action in workflows that can change it from 'JOHN citizen' to 'John Citizen', as per below:

 

NPW_0-1675055283728.png

 

Unfortunately this will not fix the McDonald issue though.

 

Hope it helps!

 

Read this for further info on the options for formatting: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/workflows/format-your-data-with-workflows

elizsmith
Contributor

This will only work if you are paying for the Operations Hub 😑