HubSpot Ideas

jehiguese

Disable automatic contact creation for Conversations

HubSpot auto creates a contact for anyone that emails in - or is cc'd into a reply in conversations. For some customers who manage through support, this will mean a large number of contacts can enter the database. The only way to prevent this at the moment is by setting filtering rules, as all filtered emails do not create contacts. There is a use case from a customer in this post [Hyperlink removed by moderator as it linked to an archived Community post with duplicate information]

 

This is a request to build a "Create contact" rule giving us the option to disable automtically creating contacts for people we communicate with in Conversations.

 

324 Commentaires
cambria
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Hi everyone, my name is Cambria - I'm a Product Manager on the Conversations team. Thank you to everyone who has upvoted this discussion, shared your use cases, and added your thoughts and opinions over the past several months.

 

Before we dive into things, I just want to say that this feature was absolutely not designed to push any of our customers above their contact tier limit.

 

Contacts are the beating heart of HubSpot, and we want to empower teams using the Inbox to have remarkable 1:1 conversations, largely leveraging the power of contacts so they can have a 360 degree view of who they're talking to and previous interactions they might've had with their team.

 

That said, we know there's a few problems with our current system.

 

1) Contact tier limits - we know this is a problem and we're exploring solutions internally on how we can address this.
2) Filtering - we need to improve our system for filtering spam/undesirable emails so they never get to the point where they're being added as contacts anyway. We're planning on tackling later this year after some core email infrastructure work we're doing in the first half of the year.

 

I know this may not be the response you hoped for, but thank you again for all your feedback and patience with this issue. We'll keep this post updated when we have further announcements to share on progress here

Hatchman
Participant

Absolutely support this idea - we have our contact DB being filled with inrelevant entries that take time to repeatedly address.

SonnyTai
Membre

This is a joke. Hubspot is never going to fix this "feature" because it is a massive cash cow for them.

 

We're seriously considering migrating to a different platform. 

kbkbkbkb
Membre

Any news yet as this is causing me a nightmare too.

sk0si
Contributeur

We're also struggling with that feature. It's better to have no data than wrong data. So we want to add contacts manually from a ticket to ensure the quality of the data. 

 

Now we have a workaround with workflow-notification to ensure quality, but most of the contacts from conversation we really don't need. Happy-manual-deleting-day, till that issue is solved. 

rosiehall
Membre

I can't believe this hasn't been sorted and reply from Hubspot seems to ignore what asking for.  Why not just have a setting where can turn off automatic creation of contacts?

 

 

kbkbkbkb
Membre

I agree. This is a major thing and would be a massive help for every single Hubspot user.

There's no excuse for not doing this right away.

 

Radders
Membre

Please make auto creation optional. Our team, who receives email and live chat from both B2B prospects and B2C support enquiries would prefer to optionally add B2B client contacts only. As many other members have stressed, the current system makes more work for my team in clearing contacts constantly. 

JustinRehearsal
Membre

Have need of optional automatic contact creation. From a support perspective, every support email does not need a fresh contact created.

Millerd
Membre

Hubspot please can you resolve this issue, it really is quite simple !

 

cdewey22
Équipe de développement de HubSpot

Hi - Thanks all for your feedback here! 

 

I wanted to dig in a bit to understand a bit more. From reading through this, it seems like there are two issues:

1. Auto creating contacts that cause clutter in the CRM

2. Adding contacts that you would have to pay for later when you might just be having a quick conversation and do not need to follow up with them. I am assuming this is for mostly support usecases?

 

Does that capture the usecases or if there are others would you provide them below! thanks!

pingland222
Participant

@cdewey22  - Yes that is the case for us on both of your points. They clutter and cause us increased contacts. 

NCO
Contributeur de premier rang

Hi @cdewey22 - thanks for chiming in on this thread.

I don't want to speak on behalf of others but I believe the general sentiment here is that Hubspot needs to create a setting in conversations that turns off the auto-creation of contacts (similar to the "log to CRM" setting within the email extension which can be toggled on and off as the default).

 

The clutter is definitely one issue, but if Hubspot's pricing model is centered around the number of contacts users have in their CRM, automatically adding new ones without giving people the option to opt-out of that is the bigger problem.

Hatchman
Participant

I agree with the synopsis but would also like to add that this is made even worse by emails with CC:'s.  We'll receive request fro quotes where the sender has included 1/2 dozen other people which are then all created within our system.   Whatever you deploy needs to include some form of blocklisting by both email and domain.

 

Millerd
Membre

Absolutely

 

This thread is also shown in a number of other places in the forum and is seemingly a major fustration for all of us. There are other aspects to this too:

 

1. Highly confidential information is now in an open forum, as has been covered in other posts, retrenchments, disciplinary actions and email personal in nature etc. cannot form part of HS.

2. Loss of sales team credibility as they are questioning why all their personal corresponence and contacts are now cluttering their workspace, this is quite a big issue as I am already having pushback on real monitoring of sales communication and this is driving a reason to be reluctant to use the system.

3. It is driving Sales people to use alternative email addresses not on the HS platform 

4. Not being able to easily perform a manual review new DB entries/creations (recent contact activity ie from email comms now erroneously logged) that have not been marked as MQL and SQL is now very challenging as you cannot weed out the business/sales contacts from all other sources of irrelevant email comms and auto-created contacts. Prior to connecting Gmail to HS this was simple, any new contacts were reviewed and updated. This allowed us to follow up on the DB for where a Sales or marketing person had forgotten to update contact status'es.

5. Filtering Contacts and Companies for marketing and sales campaigns is now impossible for the same reasons as in 4. unless the status updates is 100% applied.

6. Last but not least I have no intention of emailling personal contacts of my Sales teams so this provides additional limitations on our HS use.

 

As we work in a colaborative process having acess to exactly what email communiation is happening with customers is critical so making this communication private to the contact owner is also not an option.

 

The entire idea of running HS is to be able to easily manage as "clean" a DB as possible, categorise, sort and then ACTION. With non relevant data being populated it is creating not only admin headaches but undermining the tool with our internal staff.

 

 

 

 

Millerd
Membre

To add to the suggestion, I would be very happy for us to automatically log all communication for contacts ALREADY IN HUBSPOT if there were in there we obviously want to manage and record all interactions.

 

If a contact is not in hubspot then instead of having the option to log this interaction, why not simply ask if you can add them in. This would solve all of these issues.

 

 

adriansprake
Participant

@cdewey22 I would agree with all of the above.  For us the issue is several fold, and not at all dissimilar to what @Millerd has so eloquently laid out above.

Fundamentally however it should be possible to control which interactions should create a contact automatically and which shouldn't rather than HubSpot deciding it for us.  Our database is continually being filled up with useless contact data that then has to be manually purged as well as sensitive HR emails being logged within HuBSpot for the staff members to see if the sales manager forgets to turn off Office 365 integration.  It would be great if, as part of the funcionality, you could set a minimum set of contact property requirements for all contact creation rather than just contacts created manually 

laurae
Participant

It would be helpful to address this in forms to some extent. You could choose if a form should automatically create a contact, and also be able to disable this function for a specific form.

sk0si
Contributeur

@cdewey22 

1) is causing a clutter that means a lot of manual correction.

2) is the effect of Nr. 1), while 2) a broadly known issue is in the pricing modal of hubspot.

 

For me Nr. 1 is really necessary to get rid of, because we have to edit each one again (or delete them).

 

And Nr. 2 requires a creative conceptional solution in pricing modal. That's a thing in a bigger context (mailing, crm, conversations), not only referring to that single technically issue.

daisysb94
Membre

Hi Hubspot!

I agree with everyone here, the ability to disable automatic contact and company creation via the conversation inbox would be AMAZING. I am very selective about which contacts I bring into Hubspot - and this will help declutter to ensure we only have quality contacts in our list.