Contact field rewriting after form submission and deduplication mechanisms

[mrFleshka]

Hi, We have concerns about the deduplication system working after submitting the form.

When user submit form with email, that already exists in our contacts DB, this contact main data (FirstName, LastName and other, thet presents in form) will rewriten with new one (submitted data).

This can lead to certain attempts to overwrite important contacts in HS through the forms on the site.

Do you have some mechanisms for prevent this logic? Or maybe some tips on how to avoid overwriting important fields?

[Lukas_Mrizo]

Form rewriten company

Hello, I have a problem. I use a form in which, in addition to contact properties, there are also company properties. If the contact enters a new company, it will rewrite the existing company. How to set hubspot to create a new company with a contact association in this case?

[NicoSchulz]

I was searching for this feature as well. I am really surprised, that such a simple feature was not yet implemented. A simple checkbox for each field would be sufficient "Don't override existing data, if value is already present" for example.

A simple usecase is to collect the comany name of a contact, but once we already have a company name (which we might have customized) we do not want to overwrite it. Without that feature we either override existing data or no not collect that useful information at all.

Will hubspot devs read this chat here, or is there a way to submit feedback for that?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @mrFleshka,

Are there any property that you're thinking about specifically?

If you want to capture information in a field but do not want it to override an existing value, you would need workflows.

You'd have to create a custom property which acts as a clone of the original one, to be used only in forms. The actual property would not be used in forms anymore. You would then use a workflow to enroll contacts who now have a value in the cloned property, check whether the original property is empty and only then copy the information from the clone into the original property. Should the workflow find a value in the original property, nothing would happen, the clone property value would not be copied.

This workaround requires workflows (only available in Professional and Enterprise subscriptions) and unfortunately I'm not aware of any other ways to approach this. You could of course omit the workflow but you would then be left with two properties and potentially redundant information.

As far as I know the default behavior of forms cannot be changed to not update a value – essentially that's the only thing a form does.

If you want to ensure that a contact's information is not accidentally overwritten by another website visitor's information (e.g. because they were forwarded a link), I'd recommend enabling the option "Always create contact for new email address" in the form options.

Best regards!

[mrFleshka]

Yeah, thx. We think and implement additional custom properties for all fields in site forms.

I don't know about workflows, thx for information.

We'll try to use this method.