Junk Form Entries Overwrite Good Contact Records - Help Put a Stop to It
Here is something many HubSpot marketing & sales customers don't know. If cookie tracking is enabled on your forms (this is the default option), your CRM may be silently overwriting valid contact information with junk entries over time. And if this is happening to you, there's a good chance you won't know about it until there's a lot of manual cleanup to be done.
HubSpot development already has a fix on the table:
"When a new submission comes through from an identity tracked cookie with a different email address (or 100% different values for all fields) create a new contact record instead of overwriting the existing data."
Vote for this idea to make sure HubSpot knows this is a top priority for its customers. Until this fix is implemented we as customers must choose between useful reporting (cookies enabled) and data integrity (cookies disabled).
Even I am facing a similar issue. For the first entry through a form say test1, it creates a new contact. But for every new form fills, it over writes the contact of test1. So, in the end, there is only one contact from a form, no matter how many people are filling the form.
This is incredibly frustrating! If there were at least some way we could easily identify these contacts or were alerted when this happened - even that would be helpful.
This is happening more and more and is a major headache. There is no easy solution or even a manual solution that works becausae you lose all the contact's history.
It's more than a little concerning that this has been a known issue since at least 2017. Pre-filling forms is a great feature that lowers resistance to completing a form, but there has to be some checks to prevent overwriting existing data.
We've had several instances where either 2 or more people in an office share an email address (crazy but not an isolated case) or cases where an assistant might download something on their manager's computer, where they unknowingly have changed their manager's contact info to their own. You can imagine the confusion this causes internally when our team can no longer find the original contact in our system.
I am just facing this from a process perspective. It might force us to create some sort of staging / shadowing infrastructure to protect the quality of some crucial fields, therefore avoiding the John Doe prospect to ruin the fields that might serve the same John Doe customer.
There NEEDS to be a fix for this. I work in post-secondary education and our current and graduated student info is being overwritten by other pepole's info simply becuase they happened to use the same computer. So now, John Smith who has never enrolled comes up as a graduated student because his info replaced the info of Susan Jones who did graduate. It's very frustrating.
