APIs & Integrations

roman1
Member

Addressing Email-Changed on Form Submissions

We’re noticing that we have a lot of data being changed around in hubspot… I.e., someone will submit a form, and then submit a different form later, sometimes with a different name and sometimes with a different email. This is becoming a major problem for our customer service team to use Hubspot as a CRM, and for us to keep data consistent with our internal customer database. So I have a few questions I’d like to follow up on:

  1. We set up a workflow alert to try to capture email/name changes. Workflow is “If form submission >1 and if email = known” to send an internal alert. Idea is that the “known” part trigger if something changes, as per this support: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Lists-Lead-Scoring-Workflows/Can-a-Contact-Property-change-trigger-... . However, I’ve noticed that we’ve triggered that alert for someone who didn’t change their email (but did resubmit a form under a different name). Is there a better way to trigger this?

  2. In order to make sure we’re associating the right data with the right customers, is there a way to create a new contact on every form submission (if the name or email are different), without turning cookies off? (cookies have been tremendously valuable to us)

2a. If yes, is there a way to “merge contacts” to deal with duplicates?

2b. If no, we’re looking into using jquery to “kill” a cookie on hubspot form submissions if a previously identified customer changes the prepopulated (“remembered”) name and/or email fields to create a new customer. Has anyone done this? Can you offer any advice on addressing this?

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Derek_Gervais
HubSpot Alumni
HubSpot Alumni

Addressing Email-Changed on Form Submissions

Hi @roman,

  1. That’s the best way to trigger that particular workflow. If the workflow is set to re-enroll contacts based on ‘Email is known,’ then submitting a form that doesn’t change the contact’s email should not re-enroll the contact. I’d need to look at the workflow (and an example contact) in order to fully troubleshoot that.
  2. Turning off cookie tracking on the form is the only way to create a new contact on every form submission. The deduplication of contacts based on cookie info isn’t separate from the other benefits of cookie tracking, they’re part of the same process. Unfortunately it’s not possible to have one without the other.
    1. There’s no process to programmatically merge contacts, but duplicates can be merged manually from the contact record (see below).
    2. I can’t offer any advice here, since I haven’t really seen anyone build something like this. The only way I can see it working is if you lookup a visitor’s cookie value when they load the page with the form, and prevent cookie submission if they’ve entered a different email than what you have in HubSpot. I wouldn’t recommend this, since missing out on cookie tracking info and dealing with duplicate contacts is usually more trouble than contacts changing their email address.
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