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.

 

HubSpot Updates
February 07, 2024 10:14 AM

Thanks @dave-kimble and @cjl2016 for your quick and equally thorough replies.

Without addressing every point in each of them, I too want to make a note about "Never Log" (which is distinct from Allow/Deny lists, and I know that confuses some customers). I appreciate you bringing it up. It's helpful to hear about the relationship between 'never log' and 'disable auto contact creation.'

 

I don't think there is a post in the Ideas forum about it, but in our internal tools for tracking customer support requests, the fact that the Conversations Inbox currently does not respect the CRM Never Log list is a top item. And, actually, it would be fair to call that "Being Reviewed" as well.

 

We can look into Inbox respsecting the Never Log list - open question about whether that should be admin configurable, or just, standard.

Similar to auto-contact-creation, the devil is in the backend details. 

Being Reviewed
February 07, 2024 08:53 AM

Hi folx,

I’m Eric Hirsh, a Product Manager in Service Hub.

 

Thank you for continuing to upvote and comment on this Idea, even when there hasn’t been a HubSpot response for a long time. A long-running pain point deserves a thoughtful response, and we want to take the time to give one to you because you deserve it.

 

It might look like we haven’t been listening (and that is painful in and of itself), but we have been passively following and have now had enough preliminary discussions that I can move it into “Being Reviewed.” This does not mean we are building a solution right now or saying anything about ‘when’ but it does mean we are thinking carefully about implementation, and doing so in a way that solves more customer problems than it creates. 

 

Some housekeeping, since the original issue was opened in 2018 and HubSpot looked very different then

  • I am interpreting this idea to be specifically about when customers connect team-monitored email addresses (such as for customer support)  to the Conversations Inbox and also Help Desk, where, yes, it is currently the case that an email message from a new email address does automatically create a contact, and there are currently no settings to adjust or disable that.
  • I see comments about suggestions for, and workarounds with, our Gmail or Outlook extensions. The way that personal email addresses (e.g. for individual sales reps) connect to HubSpot is a different (but related) system, so any feedback you have about contacts, automatic creation, logging, never-logging, etc should be handled in separate Ideas posts than this one.

One of the main critiques in the comments is that HubSpot might be ignoring fixing this issue so that it can generate revenue by increasing the number of contacts in a customer’s account. This is not true. Since the last update to this Idea by a HubSpot product manager, HubSpot implemented that contracts are based off of the number of marketing contacts in an account.

 

Two important things to know about the Conversations Inbox

  • It does not automatically create contacts for email addresses from messages flagged by the system as Spam.
  • It does not create marketing contacts. At all. All of the contacts created by Inbox are “non-marketing” contacts.

 

This of course doesn’t lessen the pain for any of you that are struggling to manage messy CRM data.

 

It seems to me like there are at least two camps of frustrated customers here

  1. Those whose team email addresses connected to the inbox are receiving an undue amount of spam, and for various, and possibly different reasons, our Spam system is not flagging them. Thus contacts are getting created.
  2. Those who do want to receive and respond to all of the legitimate (non-spam) messages that come into their team email address in Inbox, but for some (and possibly various/different) reasons do not want to manage those messages against contacts created in the CRM.

Does that sound right? Does anyone else have a fundamentally different use case?

 

HubSpot has made improvements in spam handling over the years. Could anyone in Camp #1 please comment with any patterns you detect in the volume and type of messages you get and where you see our Spam filtering working vs not working?

 

And Camp #2, I’m really curious to hear about the relationship between wanting to monitor and reply to inbound messages in Inbox but not associate those messages with any contacts in the CRM. Why is this? Does it have to do with the amount of inbound messages you receive? Whethere they are current customers, high quality leads, or very low quality leads? Does it depend on if you are using an Inbox for customer support, or maybe pre-sales or event marketing? Does it have to do with a given team email address being used possibly by too many teams for too many purposes?

 

Multiple people are asking for, and think it’d be ‘easy’ to ‘add a toggle.’ It’s understandable to want a quick solution to stop the pain ASAP.

 

Someone else commented “My guess is that it is not a simple "fix". If they want to change to add this feature, it breaks more functions in Hubspot.”

For email, at least, this is why we are more carefully considering a solution. You might be familiar with the concept of ‘visitors’ vs ‘contacts’ especially with our Live Chat channel. An implication of the community-proposed solution is something akin to ‘email visitors’ instead of ‘email contacts’ on the backend of our conversations system - we need something, if it is not a CRM object, to associate all the different email conversations to over time. Visitors vs Contacts has implications for Reporting, Automation, and other key features for customers who want to efficently manage customer relationships in the Inbox.

 

Thanks again for your honest feedback. It is important to us! 

 

Any news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread, so stay tuned!

 

Sincerely,

 

Eric

Idea Submitted
June 05, 2020 12:34 PM

Thank you all so much for this feedback and direction! I will be reviewing this with the team and will post an update. We have a few upcoming features that should address some of this pain so I will share in the next couple weeks as we have a more details. Thank you!

June 02, 2020 05:14 AM

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!

324 Replies
aspen23
Member

Our users have stopped logging email communications into HubSpot due to CCd individuals being automatically created as new contacts.   This is obvioulsy not what we want- hopefully it doesnt come to this, but unfortunately the end result here will be a need to move away from HubSpot. 😞

GLeigh
Participant

We have to get someone to "clean" the cc'd contacts out every month, very frustrating and should be a simple fix. Come on @hubspot  sort it out 🙂

STECHNOLOGIES
Member

Dear HubSpot product Team,

 

I have seen so many users are struggling to disable the auto creation of a contact which is created while having conversation synch with Facebook. So after the Facebook synchronization , all the messages on FB messenger are appearing in Conversation. But we do not want all these conversations become a Contact. We would like to create manually the contact who is relevant to become a prospect.

 

Please help.. Been highlighting this issue for quite a long time but no fix..

 

Thankyou,

 

MilesHeadStart
Contributor

I just set up the inbox to discover that everything sent to my email becomes a contact by default. This is crazy! HubSpot replied two years ago that they were working on this...

STECHNOLOGIES
Member
Yes , Unfortunately , lot of people are facing this issue .. But no fix !
Alexandru_Birso
Member

Very Higly needed. Thank you!

SBruckel
Member

HupSpot should offer a setting where contact creatio is optional; for example, in the side bar for HubSpot in Outlook, it would offer "add contact to HubSpot".  Quick and simple and avoides adding hundreds of non-client contacts.

AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

Hi @SBruckel , Hubspot does have a setting in the Outlook widget that allows you to turn contact creation off by default, and then you can enable it only for the emails that you want to be logged in Hubspot - and the contact created. The main issue is with the email address that is connected to Hubspot Inbox - where every email creates a contact. This, if I understood correctly your point above. Best.

SBruckel
Member
Thank you very much - I see the setting now - I will try that. Thank you for pointing it out.
AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

👍

STECHNOLOGIES
Member

Thankyou AlexandruB , My problem is not from email , I have connected with facebook messenger and any messege is facebook messenger creates a contact which I dont want. I only want to create the contacts who provide certain information in messenger ? How can we achieve this to disable autocreation of contacts...

 

Please help.

 

 

Thankyou,

 

AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

Ok, so again this is connected to the inbox (Hubspot's). I don't think you can do anything about that, meaning to prevent the contact from being created. You can delete after, create filters, monitor, etc, etc, but don't think there is a way to prevent it.

pille
Participant

We receive tons of spam via chat and I find we're constantly dealing with the aftermath.

Even if we mark the contact as being blocked, the company might still be created and we're constantly cleaning up. 

 

It would be great to decide from a chat whether we want to create the contact or not.  This might also be beneficial from emails too.

Cdubya
Member

How come the use case is a private resource? I am a Sales level HS customer, and I would like to see it. 

Cdubya
Member

This issue seems to be frustrating quite a few people, with no clear solution, except to manually add emails to the Never Log list, or to manually delete non-essential contacts. 


I have an idea but need some help. Is there a way to differentiate contacts automatically created by the Sale Extension vs. contacts created from chatflows, workflows, and our users?

AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

@Cdubya , actually there is. You find a contact that was created through the Sales Extension. Go to "View all properties". Check the "original source" drilldown fields. Mine sais "EXTENSION". Go to the Clients tab, create a filter. And that should be it.

JDietrich1
Member

This is such an obvious necessity that I cannot fathom how this feature doesn't already exist.

Cdubya
Member

@AlexandraB yes and no, even if you use the drill down fields, some contacts created by the chatflow are not able to be located. A work around was to create a custom property from the chatflow to "tag" the source of the contact so you can use HS filters to create a view. 

AlexandruB
Contributor | Partner

👍. We work with what we have. Although, something better is needed in this area. 

NicoleJ
HubSpot Moderator

+1 updates?