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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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!
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
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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
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.
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.
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.
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