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.

 

Actualizaciones de HubSpot
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. 

Estado actualizado a: 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

Estado actualizado a: 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 Comentarios
Hyumi
Miembro

This thread is going on for 2 years, is there any update available on this, using a crm should simplify and save us time. But now I am wasting several hours each week in deleting spammy contacts. 

hubby101
Participante

Same here. They seem not to care about this issue.

Every single flipping email creates a contact......

Come on hubspot people, you can do much better!

krs360
Participante

I get so many notifications about this thread its actually a joke that this isn't fixed yet. Anyone would think that there might be some monetary gain from not implementing such a basic feature.

 

Oh wait.

 

Nevermind.

Millerd
Miembro

Has you even bothered to read this thread ? Funny how people are so quick to complain 

krs360
Participante

Quick to complain?


I contributed earlier in the thread so if you had bothered to read it you'd have seen that but then you couldn't even be bothered to proof read your own post so... yeah. 🤣


Your opinion doesn't change the fact that it's a very real problem that's been around for a long time..

 

Cheers now.

louquay
Miembro

Hi all,

 

This is an issue that my company is facing now as well. Every time we receive an email we are automatically having the contact added to the database, even if its spam. Our team is small and our database is small to reflect it so, while this system exists the way it does, we are prone to excess charges for a larger database than we currently require.

 

Would really appreciate a quick fix to this, although I can see it's been an issue for 4 years for some.


Thank you!

Luke.

Hatchman
Participante

I'm just another customer but the Hubspot conference was last week where they announced a new licensing model.  It appears to address this by allowing the ability to designated contacts as marketing contacts which are what count against your licensed amount.   https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-contacts

 

CapitalCulture
Miembro

We are faced with the same issue - trying to use Hubspot to enable our business but  finding it too complex to adminsitrate through this one seemingly simple fix.  We are losing contacts and struggling to create meaningful distribution lists as the Contacts database is overwhelmed with New Contacts that our meaningless as they are generated by spam or general business communications.  I don't want to tell my electricity company about the amazing new art one of our artists has created.  We just want to actively create new customers when they are deemed to be worthwhile to market to and turn off the automation - why is this so hard?

janhein
Miembro | Partner nivel Elite

 When do we get an time estimate on implementation of this functionality?⚠️

teniosgmbh
Miembro

Dear Hubspot team,

 

since 2018 we are asking you to fix the problem with automatic contact creation.

The request was startet Aug 27, 2018.

 

Especially the service module cannot used due to this "unintelligible" feature which creates new contacts for each mail, does not matter if you send or receive mails. 
Have you ever thought about GDPR regulations which cause problems on customer side. 

 

There are also hundreds of requirements from the HS community to find a suitable solution to avoid automatic contact creation. 
Since more than 2 years HS ignores these requirements. 

I would recommend to read this blog: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-focus - it is from hubspot.

 

Regards

Umit

timothy2
Participante

I also really need this.  But this idea has less than 200 votes.  There are more than 70 ideas that have a number of votes.  In addition, the more contacts the more they can charge.  I am not sure if Hubspot will fix it any time soon, if at all.

BSmith3
Miembro

We suddenly had a lot of Customer service inbound inquiries which doubled our contacts in our database - because of this feature. We'll never want to contact them again. It would be very helpful for us to toggle off chat contacts.

ROrkney
Miembro

Shocked by the time it has taken the development team to get their heads out and write a few lines of code. This is not a complex feature and would take a minimal amount of time to implement. The array of comments incinuating financial gain from the absence of the feature has only been addressed once by Hubspot and I find it suspicious that if there is no substantial reason for the delay in development provided. If anyone from the developing team sees this, please inform up the chain of command that this is not on parr with what is "expected" from your company - if no amendments are made, and no reasoning provided, your numbers will be worse off than if you were to have added this insignificant feature.

busdav
Participante

This definitely needs to be fixed. This is a value drain if users have to go delete these comments and clean up the data base manually. 

timothy-h
Miembro

Commenting on this thread as I'd also like the option to not have messages in my conversations inbox automatically create new contacts and companies. 

I use the conversation inbox to centralise incoming general enquiries. It allows our admin team to manage contact forms, generic 'contact@' emails, Facebook Messenger, and chatbot enquiries all in the one place. For that purpose, it's very useful. 

However, a significant portion of those enquiries are either spam or cold calls. I don't need to record these contacts in the CRM, just mark them as spam and move on. 

Webalia
Miembro

Hello, 
Thanks to @jehiguese  and to everyone for this idea. 
We are waiting this solution 🙂 

Best regards, 
Webalia, web agency 

AGreig
Participante

The fact this basic feature hasnt been resolved after years means its function is to build more contact. There are a number of basic features missing in Hubspot like Google native integration that makes it a poor Sales CRM. Its not our job as users to upvote and do your job. 

IanRogers
Participante

Has this been fixed yet?  I just joined Hubspot and noticed this shortcoming within the first 3 days of using the CRM. https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/So-Much-Spam/m-p/399623#M124353

bogdantufeanu
Miembro

The new functionality will probably be implemented when all Hubspot customers switch to the new licensing system with contact marketing and non-marketing contact. Until then, lists, filters, workflows and everything you can guys🙂

I think they have enough upvotes to realize it's an annoying problem

larissam
Miembro

I need, please! Please resolve this problem.