HubSpot Ideas

childsmd

Option to not assign a contact owner during first email

During testing of a unique business case, I identified that an unassigned Contact will be automatically assigned a Contact Owner if an email is sent through a connected inbox.
Example: contact John Doe does not have an assigned Contact Owner. Sally Smith has a connected email and sends John Doe an email. As a result of this email, Sally Smith automatically becomes the Contact Owner of John Doe. This is not preferred. When I test changing other properties (i.e. change the Job Title or other custom fields) this automatic assignment does not occur. Only when emails are sent through a connected inbox.

I would like an optional setting to turn this off. There are many instances in which I do not want an automatic assignment of contact owners (when the contact is unassigned).

44 Replies
Jayson
Participant

This also happens when our customer support team assign tickets to themselves, they also get the contact ownership! This is not anyway desired!!!

MiguelR
Participant

Hi, 

 

I have observed that too, and it is pretty annoying. In fact, I don't understand the philosophy behind it. 


We have both a Customer Support Team and a Sales Team (I don't figure out a company that hasn't), Customer Support Team members should NEVER have a Contact assigned to them, while Sales Team should ALWAYS have their own Contacts. 

 

Please, could anyone specify the rules of assignment (I've seen several cases on which this rule doesn't apply), and also a workaround to avoid this Contact Owner modification?

ArmandL
Member

I fully agree with what Miguel said.

Our customers want to be helped as fast as possible when they have a question. They couldn't care less if they are helped by Bob or by John. 

And to add regarding the sales, if it's low priced items, there is no real need for a assigned sales rep either. You don't have to build a relationship when you're selling an online course for $99.

rbarreca
Participant

We want this as well. Our contacts are helped by multiple agents and we don't want them to be auto-assigned to the first person that replies to them.

adaly-idscan
Member

We are also having this issue wen our support team replies to customer emails. Is there any workaround for this at the moment or is this issue being looked into by HubSpot?

PSmerkovitz
Member

is there a resolution to this. Its a very irritating issue 

MTacawy
Member

We would love the option to disable this setting. We have no case case for this feature, in fact, it is undesirable for us.

DLucina
Member

We would love the option to disable this setting. We have no case case for this feature, in fact, it is undesirable for us.

MAure
Member

We would love the option to disable this setting. We have no case case for this feature, in fact, it is undesirable for us.

RTiongson
Member

We would love the option to disable the setting. We have no case for this feature, in fact, it is undesirable for us.

CPSCB
Contributor

We would like the option to toggle automatic Contact Owner assignment OFF from all relevant tools, including Gmail/Outlook extensions and Connected inboxes.

 

Impact: Due to permissions/roles we have set, Users are locked out of certain contact records which should be shared following automatic assignment by the email HubSpot Sales extensions. This also results in Users missing notifications, impacting SLA attainment.

 

Support's suggestion to create a workflow that re-sets ownership if there is no additional activity in 7 days, or something along those lines that would trigger the contact to enroll, and then clear the "contact owner" value does not work even if we reduce the delay as the property impacts everything from created Views to Lists to Notifications to other Workflows, ie creating a much heavier system load than necessary and room for many errors and gaps.

 

BDehlinger
Participant | Diamond Partner

I'm surprised this request is still in "submitted" status because this feature is disruptive to many sales organization Rep assignment rules. Our Sales Reps don't own a Contact/account until they book a meeting. They may email the Contact 5x before that happens and we don't want them assigned the account until we consider it a viable lead. 

 

Sales Reps are notoriously sensitive about account ownership and we need to control assignments as much as possible. 

 

I know that we can do a workaround by assigning all unassigned accounts to a dummy account, but we shouldn't have to do this. We can change the auto-assign a company to contact ownership feature, let's be able to manage this as well. 

jlariccia
HubSpot Employee

As a support specialist for HubSpot, I would appreciate seeing this idea come to fruition. I have customers who chat in and ask about this every month or so (sometimes even more often). Thank you! 🙂

Jaycee_Lewis
Community Manager

Adding another Support comment as I get chats about this causing issues for customers and frustration that it is not something they can disable.

 

Otterbot
Contributor

Yes, please stop this auto-ownership assignment. When there are multiple teams working in Hubspot at an enterprise level, this becomes a mess.

Mary_Pouliot
HubSpot Employee

I am and Onboarding Specialist at HubSpot with a customer who also views this as a pain point. Similiar to use cases noted above, a user does not "own" a contact until an appointment is booked. Their CRM is full of customers that are unassigned but communicate with Support regularly...if a Support Rep emails a customer and becomes their "owner", it disrupts the sales process. I'm now trying to determine a workaround to solve for this and will report back if I find anything.

rmagness
Participant

YESSS!  why did they make this default?!

laurabren
Contributor

+1 to this idea! As others have noted, ownership over leads/accounts can be a particularly sensitive issue for sales-driven organizations. HubSpot allows you to disable most other automatic property updating, so I'm surprised we're not allow to disable/modify this.

HrönnVeronika
Member

+1 Please remove auto association of contacts and companies.

lukecro
Participant

+1 ... Auto-assignments for sales reps can be a great convenience in multiple scenarios, but Hubspot is way too over-aggressive with auto-assignments. More granular control options for this are a must.


The customer service vs. sales part of this being especially pertinent from my perspective ... We have a 20+ person customer support team talking to customers via Hubspot Service/Tickets/Conversations and they're constantly getting auto-assigned as the "Contact owner" to hundreds of contacts -- making them surface in Sales reports without additional filtering, as if they were the biz dev reps or account managers.

I've set up workflows to clear them from the ownership field after the fact, and that's helpful -- but that's a kinda clunky solution and doesnt work for every scenario.