Option to turn off HubSpot Insights on company records

[KathaHub]

 We use the CRM for the German market and unfortunately HubSpot Insights pulls a lot of incorrect data on the company records. In order to avoid manual fixes by our sales team every time a new contact is created, it would be great to have the option to turn this feature off.

[KathaHub]

Hi Matt,

That is correct - this feature will universally shut off insights from populating. At some point, we may build more granular controls but as of today it is universally ON or OFF at the portal level.

Talk soon,
Dylan 

[KathaHub]

Hello HubSpot Community,

I'm excited to let you know that we have enabled a setting to disable company insights. You can read more about it here. 

[simon_k]

We have the same problem. Especially the automated allocated picture is annoying.

[LoisJ]

I'd also be quite interested in seeing some configuration options for this feature in HubSpot. For example:

• select which fields are permitted to be updated by insights (we have a lot of trouble when the company name itself is changed when syncing records with other systems); and
• scheduling when the insights search will initiate (it seems to kick off immediately on creation of the company which again, causes problems for us when syncing data with other systems). I think there are some other ideas around scheduling how often the insights feature runs to check for additional/updated data.

[bastienmeaux]

 Same with the French market. HubSpot Insights doesn't make sense for us.

[sunsetsurfer]

Second this, HubSpot Insights creates nothing but issues for us. We work with hotels globally and the HubSpot Insights feature always pulls the data from the hotels' toplevel domain - which is usually their corporate HQ, adding wrong information for empty fields (e.g. the state field that is not required for most countries, or the social fields).

[bcornman]

The problem I get is when I upload a number of accounts the City/State fields automatically default to the corporate location for every single one regardless of where the location actually is. It drives me crazy

[GailB]

Working in the UK market, whilst appreciate HubSpot is a US company, it is driving us crazy that as soon as we enter the domain name for a company it automatically uses HubSpot Insights to populate these fields and we have to go back and edit with the UK company details, it is more hassle than it is worth for us

[JiriU]

Yeah, way to go. Mess up the data integrity without giving you the option to turn it off... Seriously, our null values are legit in most cases, if you overwrite them with your nonsense data then it makes everything much more complicated. E.g. fill in details for a Germany subsidiary of a US company and voila you get the blank State filled in with the State of the US Headquarters. Later on such record becomes invalid as we have data sanity checks in place to ensure you don't enter states for the countires which don't have them.

[MattF]

This is a major option that is needed. Some of my reps have found the incorrect information being updated. If a phone number is wrong, this has a huge affect on their productivity. Please make an option to turn this feature on by a property-specific basis.

[viktoriiatsoi]

Same for Canada - state/region field updates itself to American states. Very annoying. 

[jveler_ecrs]

Agreed. HubSpot changing our data, or adding data it thinks is right, but not right for us, is a problem and at least something we should be able to have a degree of control over.

+1000 - Please add this switch. Can't there be a simple toggle for now and an "if the toggle is on run the code"?

Please help me stop frustrating my sales team.

[jveler_ecrs]

What I found really interesting is that the Company Insights was taken out of the UI for HubSpot in 2016 as a sales tool because HubSpot KNEW it was ineffective and had "spotty" data:

"You've given us great feedback on the tool, and reviews have been mixed on its utility. While some may appreciate the intention of the tool, the data lacks actionable takeaways and next steps for sales teams, and is sometimes spotty. In full transparency, as the tool has grown, it has been increasingly difficult to provide data of the level of quality that you deserve."

So, the reviews were "mixed" enough that you pulled it? Why not just say they were negative?

Lacks actionable takeaways? Is that because a salesperson doesn't know how to use a lead list or because the data is bad? Looks like HubSpot is saying the latter, but putting it at the end of the sentence with a downplay of "sometimes spotty"?

They finally finish it out by flushing the b.s. with the full transparency of it being "increasingly difficult to provide data of the level of quality that you deserve."

SOOO... now we deserve it without any option to turn it off??? Cognitive dissonance HubSpot. Give us something on this... or pay for our CRM managers / Data Librarians to clean up your mess.

Sidenote - I guess one good thing about being in marketing: you know when folks are writing press releases only in the way that makes the problem/issue a solution/benefit. Does HubSpot consider that they are marketing to marketers?

FYI, there are other items with varying facets of this same issue in other community forums:

• https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Contacts-Companies-Deals/Incorrect-Autofilled-Data-Insights-for-Com...
• https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Hubspot-Insight-Updating-Company-info-from-their-insi...
• https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Contacts-Companies-Deals/Company-Data-intervention-thru-Hubspot-Com...
• https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Hubspot-Insights-should-find-local-data-when-you-crea...

The only reason I can think of to NOT give us this option is because they want us to help clean up their database when we correct the issues they create for us. That's what data mining companies do...

[kristibjornaas]

Late to the game here and while this won't help with disabling the feature, there is a way to make the data much more accurate for your specefic data set using a 3rd party data technology.  I would recommend looking at ReachForce as a way to enrich this data rather than using the HS functionality which is super limited.  For those with a global focus, you get access to full hierarchy which includes those non-US site details. Should give you a lot more flexbiility with data. 

https://www.hubspot.com/integrations/reachforce

[Ruefus]

I just started using Hubspot. Were it not for this absurd 'feature', it'd be nearly perfect for my needs.

Auto-updating information with the ability to confirm or deny before proceeding would be fine. Doing it automatically and then forcing us to turn off automatic assocaition of companies and contacts to prevent it is ridiculous. One does not require the other to work properly. ZohoCRM is one that does a great job with this.

[auto_mate]

I think I added to another thread... but I reckon I have tens of thousands of fields of incorrect data from Hubspot company insights. It's not acceptable.

[StephenDB]

I agree 100% - the so-called HubSpot 'Insights' is a nuisance more than anything else.  The system doesn't understand organizational hierarchies, and mixes and matches contact data property fields, for instance combining data from the headquarter location with location data from international or local subsidiaries of that company.  To make matters worse, if you then go in and manually make corrections to the company records, it proceeds to override those data fields again with the bogus information.  In order to avoid that I have to remove the domain field from the record. Talk about frustrations with HubSpot...

[jveler_ecrs]

I've commented in this thread before and we still really need this option. What I think we're going to do for now is create a field set called "OUR CRM PROPERTIES" and essentially duplicate the ones that are overwritten by the "not-as-accurate" Insights. This is an inconvenience. 

At the very least in the interim, in looking at this article on your KB - could you provide an EXHAUSTIVE list of fields so we know what Insights affects?

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/companies/what-is-hubspot-insights

These are the current ones listed there:

• Name
• Industry
• Description
• Number of employees
• Phone number
• Street Address
• City
• State/Region
• Country
• Postal code
• Annual Revenue
• Is Public
• Timezone
• Website URL
• Twitter Handle 

[auto_mate]

I am very interested to hear from European and Canadian users. Most of the insights data errors I find are with EU or Can info, either being added to info or insights overwrtiting EU or Can info.

I've asked for compensation because of the cost of discovering, monitoring and remediating Hubspot Insights data errors.

(Of course, editing seems to be pointless in many cases because insights will just re-overwrite the data with bad data! 

Does raise the question of "who owns the data". Personally I think it is totally unacceptable to have a feature that deletes and overwrites my precious data. Data integroity is the first job of a CRM. I am massive HS fan by the way!

Please contact your Hubspot account manager and ask for compensation. That should get them moving!

[jveler_ecrs]

And, I'm not sure this is a Canadian or European thing... this is the state field for one of our company records over the course of the past year. Accurate data???

Example 1:

Or this???

[grr]

Agreed. We should have the option to turn off insights database association in full or on a company basis. Very annoying

Please fix this HS

[Dylan]

Hello HubSpot Community,

I'm excited to let you know that we have enabled a setting to disable company insights. You can read more about it here.