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
MSterne
Member

+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!

Simplifia
Member

+1

LOpulence
Member

+1

Gia
Member | Partner
Member | Partner

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."

KSM
Contributor

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:

 

KSM_0-1657847639071.png

 

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.

This solution might not be optimal for you.

 

jeandevesvrotte
Member

+1

Hawk-Steve
Top Contributor

+1 from me, lending my voice to the crowd!

Effectively in many CRM setups I work with, "Contact Owner" translates to "Sales Contact Owner". New ownership properties are created for different teams.

 

I'd create a workflow to clear the owner if the the team is not a sales team, but you can't use Hubspot team as a re-enrolment criteria (to do this repeatedly if needed). So this option to not assign contact owner in the first place is important

SRamírez3
Member

Hi, 

 

I have observed that too, and it is pretty annoying. 

JWarren8
Participant

Just came across this in our business, not helpful as we clear down ownership when deals are closed so they are fair game for the sales team when they come back in. 

 

I'm concerned about the same happening with ticket response an assignment as mentioned already as we haven't even scoped out service hub work yet. and if it means re-doing the sales hub work it could be a major problem. 

BNeveu
Participant

+1 Extremely annoying

JButler8
Participant

I agree! this would be tremendously useful! If I go to a contact record in Hubspot and manually assign it to a team member, Hubspot should not come up right behind me and overwrite this property. It's frustrating that there is no easy resolution to this issue. I've tried creating workflows and other workarounds, but none have been able to keep our contact owners 100% accurate... either we should be able to eliminate the 'Contact Owner' property in its entirety because it doesn't work properly, or Hubspot should fix the issue so that it works more accurately (or at the very least, allow us to pick and choose which contact properties an API/or other Hubspot features can update).

 

When contacting Hubspot support, I was only given two options as a workaround for this issue. The first one was to set limits on who can update this property (even though it's a Hubspot error that is causing this issue) or to turn off the API feature that automatically updates contact properties (even though this is a very valuable feature that we use to keep various other properties up to date). 

 

Lastly, I believe it's more than just an API update that is causing the 'Contact Owner' property from being updated inacurately. In one particular instance, the history of the property update revealed that it was changed due to the use of the contact profile in a sales inbox extension. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but usually in instances where an API is the reasoning behind an update, the history will include API in the source field. 

 

JButler8_0-1662503637230.png

 

Your assistance in fixing this issue would be greatly appreciated. Esspecially since I will now have to keep an eye on all 5K of our contacts to make sure their contact owner property is not being incorrectly adjusted.

red415
Member

+1 

LGerlich
Participant

+1 

 

Is there any ETA on this one?

JLandis
Participant

+1 After just a few weeks of new BDR sending emails, they own hundreds of companies. It makes company ownership insignificant and unmangeable. Please fix this!!!

Halli
Participant

+1

MrojasHubSpot
HubSpot Employee

+1

JLandis
Participant

We have built out workarounds for this. Previously, our reps were the company owner of thousands of accounts (I had 1,500 companies under my name, another rep had 1,300, the rest had 700-900 each). This is entirely unmanageable and makes company ownership in HubSpot an absolutely irrelevant data point. We made two changes and now our reps are only the company owner of the 50-100 companies they are actively engaged with, defined by companies with closed won deals within the last year, companies with open deals, and companies with closed lost deals within the last 60 days.

 

First, we added a "Business Development Owner" field for our BDRs to track their top prospects, as they use tasks and not deals to follow up and company ownership is set by deal data. Sales reps have also begun tagging companies using this field to stay on top of their top prospects they are working but haven't yet engaged.

 

A workflow was created to reset all company owners to unassigned, and then assign companies based on most recent deal activity. It's a cumbersome workflow with a couple dozen if/then branches that checks if companies are on active lists that filter things such as "Has an associated deal in closed won stage within the last year" to determine who the company owner should be.

 

A new "key account" field was created on the company level to bypass the above workflow, so reps can set the handful of companies that are most important to them as key accounts and not have to worry about this workflow surprising them with sudden changes to their most valuable relationships.

 

The trigger for the workflow is essentially "not a key account" and "company has an associated deal that was updated in the last day" which in theory should update the companies when deals are created/modified/contacted/closed and update the owner of the company accordingly, but in practice I end up turning this workflow off and on at least once a week to catch up.

 

This is definitely not a perfect system, but it fixes the HubSpot default "email a person and you are set as the company owner forever" to enough of an extent that seeing a rep as the company owner in our database actually means something now.

jamabryan
Participant

Yes, please.... We have multiple business units who share contacts. One business unit is calling and emailing for their purposes. I do not want the contact owner assigned at this point. Another business unit wants someone to schedule a meeting which I then have a workflow set up to create a deal. Then I want that contact to be assigned to whoever the call is scheduled with, which as long as there is no owner becomes the sales rep the call is with. Otherwise, it doesn't and screws everything up!!

christa
Contributor

Running into this issue of auto contact assignment when we are trying to use a BCC to bring emails from our transactional platform into Hubspot contact records. Each time the BCC email comes in, the contact is reassigned to the sending user (which is an alias email). Since we want our B2B sales contacts to retain their owners, we cannot simply use a workflow to clear the ownership assignment out of the contact record each time a transactional email is logged. We also operate with a lot of unassigned contacts/customers since we have contacts that don't require direct sales experience.

This auto assignment should be in our control, not a default that we can't turn off.

JLandis
Participant

Has this thread seriously been open nearly 5 years now? And not even a comment from HubSpot??

 

Our workflow that sets company owner based on deal activity has transformed our day-to-day and made our CRM so much more productive and manageable. It's irresponsible for HubSpot to continue to ignore this issue!