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).
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.
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.
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! 🙂
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.
+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.
+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.
+1 agree with all of the above. Lots of extra time required to review and change contacts inadvertantly assigned to allow the entire organization to view the contact. Perhaps the amount of time the entire HS community spends fixing this could pay for the development time within 1 day of its release!
Sadly, it would appear this issue had been known for a number of years but no progress has been made with the developers. As a HubSpot partner we have clients with sales teams that leave a company/contact as unassigned becasue all sales personnel have the opportunity to work it. In addition we have users who need to email managers and every time I unassign the company contact as soon as one of the salesmen emails them they become the contact owner and the other sales people cannot access the record.
Support sugested this work-a-round which willnot work in any of our use cases but it may work for someone else. Good luck!
"Would you consider at least changing the user permissions from "Owner only" to "team only". Then you could create 1x placeholder user for each team and assign those contact to the respective place holder user (owner) for that team and the remaining users within the same team still would be able to access the record."
We have experienced a similar sitauation. We get a lot of leads emailed to us from voice-noreply@google.com and other no-reply type addresses. These lead emails accumulate together under the relevant noreply Contact. TheContact Owner of this record is supposed to remain "unassigned". Whenever an employee accidentally does a "reply" to one of these emails via a connected inbox, HS assigns that that employee as the Contact Owner and all subsequent leads from that "noreply" email address bypass our Conversations Inbox and go straight to that person. This was very inconvenient and caused fresh leads to be overlooked because they get assigned to someone in Customer Support instead of Sales.
Here is how we partially solved our particular problem. You mileage may vary:
Create a workflow like below:
Now any Contacts with "noreply" email addresses will never have a specific Contact Owner - at least not for very long. Workflows sometimes take minutes to execute, so there is still a window for errors to happen. But at least that window is now minutes and not hours or even days.
