HubSpot Ideas

catan

Control timeline activity associations to associated objects (contacts/ companies/ tickets/ deals)

Currently, according to this KB article, there are certain set rules for activity associations: 

There are a few exceptions to the above. For example, an exception is that emails sent and calls made from any object record will also be associated to the relevant contacts that were being emailed or called.

 

These rules are not very intuitive for many users. For example, see this thread https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Associating-contact-activity-to-specific-deals/m-p/308086#M1171...

 

It would be awesome if we could have a toggle that allows users to be able to toggle automatic association of all activities for the associated contact/ company, or specific associated deals/ tickets.

61 Replies
rfourie
Participant

Hi we use tasks quite a lot and have the following queries when creating tasks from within a ticket it auto associates the task to a company and the ticket but you have to manually associated with a contact? Why is this can we get it to auto associated with the contact on the ticket? Secondly when looking at tasks in the list view, the “associated with” column is the company and not the ticket or contact. Can we set this to our preferrence of Tickets or contacts? we do not use companies. Thanks

Pavlo
Member

@catan What about the activities that are logged on a ticket and automatically associated with an open deal, whilst there is no direct association between the ticket and deal (except that they share the same contact and company)?

YiRui_Chua
HubSpot Employee

Hi team, 

Commenting for a customer here.

Are we still looking to have this set up  on HubSpot? You can imagine how useful it can be; especially the one with contact record being automatically associated with the 5 most recent deals.. That is quite problematic if this is a big client ...

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hey @YiRui_Chua! There are a few teams working on associations at large and this is part of that conversation. No definitive plans or timeline right now but we are exploring how we can best solve this for the most customer use cases. Thanks!

rfourie
Participant

We desperately need tasks that are created within a ticket record to associate to the contacts associated to the ticket.  The default is only the company.  Its a nightmare as we have to remember and then manually associate contacts to tasks ! I asked for this 12 months ago but sadly no movement on this yet we have had to tolerate some rather inconvenient updates recently (all non communicated!) which make absolutely no sense!

 

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

Thank you for your feedback everybody! Our team is doing a lot of work with associations and we are currently evaluating needs as relate to activities. I will continue to provide updates on this post as work progresses.

OLM
Participant

The KB article referenced really needs to note that automatic associations do not apply to activity created via API.

Andrepp
Participant

Essa é uma dor que passamos por aqui tambem, no nosso caso como existem vários tickets vinculados a um e-mail, a resposta desse e-mail quando fechado, reabre diversos tiquets, fazendo com que tenhamos que checar vários tickets para tratar apenas 1. A Opção seria sempre que criarmos um ticket desmarcar as caixas de vinculação, mas com uma central de atendimentos quase sempre um ou outro acaba esquecendo.

AGran
Participant

Hi,

 

we also stumbled over this and it is creating a crazy mess in our hubspot instance.

We have lots of customers where we have more than one deal open. When one of those customers sends us an email, it is auto associated with ALL open deals. Best case this means all but one association wrong, sometimes, if it should rather be a new deal, all associations wrong. Unticking this is both a significant amount of work and - when someone overlooks that - will create utter chaos later on.

 

I really can't imagine a case where auto associating with more than one deal would make sense. Even with one deal it is dangerous at best. Pipedrive solves this using (B)CC addresses, which makes this much more controllable.

 

In any case, minium required solution is to switch that bevhaiour of, at least when there is more than one deal open.

Hubspot considers current behaviour not as a bug, as it is "by design". I disagree, because so far no one could explain to me why that design would make sense for anyone having mutliple deals open.

 

regards

Alex

DBläser
Participant

Hello,

 

we have many clients with whom we have more than one deal. The setting that there is an automatic association with the last 5 deals is dramatically bad for us. Our customer history is built up with incorrect activities. It's not intuitive and productive. A lot of manual effort is required to make the correct associations. There is a lot of criticism from our internal users and reducing the acceptance of Hubspot.

It would be great if we can set the option ourselves.

regards

Dirk

ahurley
HubSpot Employee

Awesome idea - would love to see this impleented for users 🙂

Howie50
Participant

I agree, there are instances where we have many different deals that are associated to different contacts within the same company who have nothing to do with each other. It is very frustraining for my sales team as they always ask about a fix and I have no way to change it.

 

This is esspeically a problem for logged meetings, where the activity object association is quite aggressive and ends up adding almost all of the deals (up to 10 or more) since they are active deals that have long lead times. 

 

Please keep us updated on the status of this development!

JBudd
Member

We have a very similar use case that creates havoc in our instance:

 

Our problem is that we have contacts that are "Selling Partners". They have a primary company and then are associated with several deals, which are attached to different companies. We DO NOT WANT contacts timeline activities to be carried between deals! It makes a mess for regular contacts that are associated with only 1 company, but it's a complete disaster for those Selling Partners that can be associated with a large number of unrelated deals/companies. 

 

At the least, we need the option to CHOOSE whether or not we want to include the contact's timeline activities when we associate him/her with an existing deal. It is possible to choose whether to associate the activities history (defaults to Last 30 days, but can be unchecked) during the deal creation process, so why not when associating a contact to an existing deal? That would be extremely helpful.

 

Thank you for considering this request as soon as possible.

inigolekunberri
Participant | Diamond Partner

Hello @Anonymous, any progress about this development?

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi @inigolekunberri thanks for reaching out about this. I don't have any specific updates to share on this issue at this time. As the team is working on restructuring associations across the platform, this has been part of the conversation but we do not have any definitive plans as of yet.

inigolekunberri
Participant | Diamond Partner

Thank you @Anonymous. Did Association Labels change in any way activity associations?

Anonymous
Not applicable

@inigolekunberri association labels do not currently have any affect on activity associations but I would be curious if that would be helpful for you and if so, how you would like that to work.

JBudd
Member

@Anonymous we started noting the unwanted associations I mentioned above shortly after we enabled the "multiple associations/association labels" feature earlier this year. Whether it really started happening then, or it was just a coincidence from our newfound awareness of associations, I could not tell. At any rate, I hope that any potential association labels effect on activity associations would be something that we can control, and not be a default HS setting :).

 

inigolekunberri
Participant | Diamond Partner

@Anonymous a clear example: salespeople is complaining because open Deal records are showing activities related with the contact/company but have nothing to do with that specific Deal. This automatic activity association is defined here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associate-activities-with-records 

APineiro1
Member | Elite Partner

Submitting this on behalf of one of my clients - this is an essential feature we're in need of. My client has a long onboarding process that we've worked to automate, but several of the automations require that activities (like meetings) get associated to the ticket. Since this is not automatic, it's causing us to take cumbersome, manual steps.

 

The team is using a combo of HS meetings links and Calendly, which only put meetings on the contact record. They can't use the "book a meeting" feature directly on the ticket, they need to do it through a meetings link so the customer can book with them and so they can see their schedle. So unless they remember to go back to the contact record, find the activity, and manually associate it to the ticket, it doesn't happen and thus the ticket automations don't work. This is incredibly cumbersome for them.

 

Additionally, if you're sending a one off email, you can do that from the ticket and it gets associated to the ticket and contact no problem, but if you're sending a sequence - even if you send the sequence to the contact FROM the ticket record - it doesn't associate the email automatically to the ticket. So again, there's that manual step of remembering to go to the contact and associating the email, otherwise the workflows won't work.

 

I've tried to think of some work arounds for this but the problem is that contact based workflows only let me do so much with ticket actions and I can't specify which ticket pipelines these automations are for. So if I build an automation that says "when this email is sent, move the ticket to this stage". It doesn't let me say "only move tickets in this pipeline to this stage", it will move all tickets into that pipeline and into that stage. Meaning, if I have an open support ticket in a support pipeline and an onboarding ticket in my onboarding pipeline, it would move both tickets to stage x in my onboarding pipeline, which is not ideal.

 

My less desireble solution request would be to make contact based workflows more robust and instead of applying actions to all associated tickets, let me filter down associated tickets in a specific pipeline/specific stage.

 

My goal solution would be having a setting I could adjust that would automatically associate contact activities to associated tickets, I don't know why it works for companies and deals automatically but not tickets, seems like it should be a switch I could toggle on or off. Taking it a step further, it would be great if I could adjust this setting depending on each ticket/deal pipeline. So Pipeline x doesn't associate contact activities with the associated ticket, but pipeline y does for example. 


Also linking another idea I found that is similar with fewer upvotes - https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Associate-Contact-Activity-with-Tickets/idi-p/416735

 

Would be happy to provide additional context/feedback and even beta test any MVPs you all build - again this is HIGHLY needed!