These fields are managed in the System Settings of your account. Once these fields are deleted they can not be restored so you may want to export the data into a CSV file in case you might need it in the future.
Hi Lyla - thank you for your response. One other question related to this...how do I move this Email Custom field into the contact details section? At this point it is much lower down the screen under "attributes" considerable distance away / off screen from all the additional contact details at top of the contact's screen.
Was there a recent change to a contact's email address field? I seem to remember you could enter more than one email address for a contact with out having to enter a custom field.
There were some recent updates made to the Custom Fields. With this update, only one email can be added but there is a new custom field type for any additional email addresses you want to add to your records.
The recent updates seem to have made the perfectly working function into a complicated function. Most people these days have multiple email addresses and we want to keep them all easy to enter and use. Having the Custom Fields is complicated. Why make a simple function complicated?
These changes were made to help enhance and improve the Insightly product and overall system performance in the long-term.
We're sorry for any inconveniences this update may have caused for your business, but now that it is in place we'll be able to add powerful new features in the coming months to streamline many of your workflows and processes that we simply couldn't before. For a list of just some of those upcoming changes, please check our article on the changes.
When the changes were made the data was moved to note. A tool has been added to bring the data back in as Custom Fields with a few clicks, the steps do this are in this article. You can even export it all if you need it.
With regard to the future, we've learned a lot from this release and will work hard to communicate changes with you as well as earning back your trust. So sorry for the trouble this may have caused.
So if you are hitting your limit on custom fields you can either lose the email addresses or lose the data you had in that last custom field? Or pay more. I am with Leah - this is just a hassle I didn't need.
As is mentioned in the article my colleague Lyla linked to in her previous message, every custom field created by the tool does not count against your custom field limits, so you don't have to worry about deleting any existing fields or upgrading your plan. :)
This recent change has totally screwed the product up for the users. I've introduced Insightly to five different companies and I'm now getting ready to turn it all off. This change has turned what was a great product into an unusable pile.
Example: A client sends me a message from an email account > I create a contact record for him and populate it with valuable information > the client sends me another message from a variation of his account (happens constantly) > I merge the new account that was automatically created with the existing one so all my data is preserved, but that email address disappears! > the client sends another email from that address and an additional contact is created with the new address > my employees add valuable data to that record > we now descend into the Wonderland Hell of poorly designed CRM's....
When you're using the SmartMerge (or Record Merge) system, you select a master record. The master record will keep any field data that doesn't allow multiple values, like custom fields or name fields. As the Email and Phone field types are now individual fields, the master record will retain all of its custom field data rather than add a new Email or Phone field.
If you've already created Email type custom fields you can always manually add your extra email addresses to those field to prevent further duplicates. You could even add the email address to the record prior to saving the email to Insightly which would prevent those duplicates from even being created in the first place.
With that said, I know that you are very frustrated by the changes that were made, and I completely understand. As our CEO Anthony Smith mentioned in the email he sent account Admins on March 27th, we should have done a better job of letting you know ahead of time what we were planning to do and when to expect the changes. Please know that we're always here to answer your questions, and we'll do our best to make sure that your voice and feedback is heard.
However, as I'm new to the system, I don't have any custom fields listed in the "Auto-Import Contact Informaton as Custom Fields," and I do have the situation where someone will send me email from different email addresses.
In that situation, you'll need to create a new custom field to house the data. We've created an Email Type Custom Field which will act identically to your standard Email field that you can use. :)
Just a reminder that you must be in the community to leave a comment. Please do not reply to the email notification because your comment will not get posted -- and that's the only way we can continue helping you :)
I agree with Leah and Admoss3. This is a complicated hassle and used to be easy. Why do this to us? I don't think this tool will work for my company's needs if the workflow is this long and confusing for my team every time a contact has multiple e-mail addresses.
Would you let me know what you're finding confusing about the process so I can help? Once you've set up the custom fields and moved them into the About section of your record, there shouldn't be any significant different between the workflow behavior of those fields previously and their behavior now.
We need multiple email address fields, as Adrian explained above. Period.
Telling us in advance you were going to take that away would not have made this change any better. We'd have been mad sooner, that's all.
I frankly wonder if any of your product design people have ever run a business or been in sales. From the changes you've made, and the little but important things you can't do with Insightly (try sorting Opportunities by some order that WE find useful, rather than the inflexible system-designated order), I find no evidence of any sales experience on your team.
That's a big problem for us users, who are now stuck with a product that got worse in a very basic and simple way.
No apologies will be useful (unless the CEO wants to call me - maybe I could knock some sense into him), please just fix the product.
If I created a custom field with additional email address for contacts, when I track emails in Insightly would it link emails from all email addresses to the same contact entry or would it only link emails from the primary address?
@Dan P. all your (as spokesman for Insightly) explanations on behalf of deleting multiple e-mails is strange and inconsistence with the rest of Insightly. If what you state is true, why didn't you delete multiple phone-numbers???...Why dindn't you delete multiple adress fields???? ... Why didn't you delete multiple social media profiles??....... because it would be wrong for the essence of a CRM tool.
I want to find and orden al relevant communication possibilities for a person in combination with his links to functions (foundations, office etc.), projects, roles etc.. The value of your product is heavily decreased by this action. This way you force us (and our partners for who I implemented Insightly) to a tool that will meet our needs in a CRM like solve360. Creating Custom fields is from a technical point of view perhaps a solution, but not customer friendly.
I'm not interessted in explanationas why, I'm interested in when and how you will come with a solution on this issue in the next 3 months. Will there be an update that makes multiple e-mails again possible (other than custom fields)?
With that said, I noticed that you still haven't used the system we added to transfer the data and fields from the created in the 3/25 update back into your account as custom fields. This tool automatically creates custom fields based on the fields that were moved, and populates those fields with the Note data. These new fields also do not count against your custom field limits.
The Social Media system only searches using the defualt email address field. Before the update, they only searched using the Email (Work) address, so this behavior is identical to the old system.
This is highly annoying. When we just did a smart merge for some contacts that had duplicate records - because they have multiple email addresses - it completely deletes the other email address. Not in a note or a custom field or anything. Plus, now as soon as we log another email message to their other address, it will again create a duplicate contact. There will be no way to stay ahead of this. It's impossible to manage contacts effectively in the world the way it is without having multiple addresses assigned for a single contact.
We generally have been happy insightly, but are worried this will make it too difficult to manage.
I must say that insightly is pretty arrogant to say that they know what their customer needs better than their customers.
And when the customers say that they want something, insightly staff tries to convince us that it they are doing this in our interest.
When people ask me what CRM we are using I tell them about insightly. How easy it is to create contacts directly from gmail. People are impressed. But when I tell them that there is a lot of duplicates because you can have just one email. Then they say that they will try something else. And I tell them that if they find another CRM, then tell me so that we can switch to.
This situation continues to be a severe problem with the system and renders Insightly into a pile of junk. Every time a person from one of my clients sends an email from an alias address it requires us to MANUALLY copy the new address into the existing record and then MANUALLY merge the two records into the original record. What moron on your product team thinks this is a reasonable user case?
How can it be possible that you provide SEVEN phone fields, but are too incompetent to handle more than one email? This is SO FRUSTRATING when Insightly used to be a sleek and effective CRM because it allowed the users to structure the system and now your product managers feel like they have to shove totally unworkable workflows down your users' throats.
Comments
You can create a Custom Field in your record for that Leila:)
How do you move the custom field that is created up into the Contact details area instaed of attributes?
Hi Raymond,
These fields are managed in the System Settings of your account. Once these fields are deleted they can not be restored so you may want to export the data into a CSV file in case you might need it in the future.
Hi Lyla - thank you for your response. One other question related to this...how do I move this Email Custom field into the contact details section? At this point it is much lower down the screen under "attributes" considerable distance away / off screen from all the additional contact details at top of the contact's screen.
Was there a recent change to a contact's email address field? I seem to remember you could enter more than one email address for a contact with out having to enter a custom field.
Hi Billie:
There were some recent updates made to the Custom Fields. With this update, only one email can be added but there is a new custom field type for any additional email addresses you want to add to your records.
The recent updates seem to have made the perfectly working function into a complicated function. Most people these days have multiple email addresses and we want to keep them all easy to enter and use. Having the Custom Fields is complicated. Why make a simple function complicated?
Hi Leah,
These changes were made to help enhance and improve the Insightly product and overall system performance in the long-term.
We're sorry for any inconveniences this update may have caused for your business, but now that it is in place we'll be able to add powerful new features in the coming months to streamline many of your workflows and processes that we simply couldn't before. For a list of just some of those upcoming changes, please check our article on the changes.
Okay, we accept that new reality, but does that mean we have lost all the other email adresses we have put there in the past?
If not where are they?
If yes, how can we trust you to not destroy our database in the futur?? :-/
Hi Stephane:
When the changes were made the data was moved to note. A tool has been added to bring the data back in as Custom Fields with a few clicks, the steps do this are in this article. You can even export it all if you need it.
With regard to the future, we've learned a lot from this release and will work hard to communicate changes with you as well as earning back your trust. So sorry for the trouble this may have caused.
So if you are hitting your limit on custom fields you can either lose the email addresses or lose the data you had in that last custom field? Or pay more. I am with Leah - this is just a hassle I didn't need.
Hi Admoss3,
As is mentioned in the article my colleague Lyla linked to in her previous message, every custom field created by the tool does not count against your custom field limits, so you don't have to worry about deleting any existing fields or upgrading your plan. :)
This recent change has totally screwed the product up for the users. I've introduced Insightly to five different companies and I'm now getting ready to turn it all off. This change has turned what was a great product into an unusable pile.
Example: A client sends me a message from an email account > I create a contact record for him and populate it with valuable information > the client sends me another message from a variation of his account (happens constantly) > I merge the new account that was automatically created with the existing one so all my data is preserved, but that email address disappears! > the client sends another email from that address and an additional contact is created with the new address > my employees add valuable data to that record > we now descend into the Wonderland Hell of poorly designed CRM's....
Hi Adrian,
When you're using the SmartMerge (or Record Merge) system, you select a master record. The master record will keep any field data that doesn't allow multiple values, like custom fields or name fields. As the Email and Phone field types are now individual fields, the master record will retain all of its custom field data rather than add a new Email or Phone field.
If you've already created Email type custom fields you can always manually add your extra email addresses to those field to prevent further duplicates. You could even add the email address to the record prior to saving the email to Insightly which would prevent those duplicates from even being created in the first place.
With that said, I know that you are very frustrated by the changes that were made, and I completely understand. As our CEO Anthony Smith mentioned in the email he sent account Admins on March 27th, we should have done a better job of letting you know ahead of time what we were planning to do and when to expect the changes. Please know that we're always here to answer your questions, and we'll do our best to make sure that your voice and feedback is heard.
The article is good.
https://support.insight.ly/hc/en-us/articles/115004461788-FAQs-for-Insightly-Field-Changes-March-25-2017-#how
However, as I'm new to the system, I don't have any custom fields listed in the "Auto-Import Contact Informaton as Custom Fields," and I do have the situation where someone will send me email from different email addresses.
Hi Michael,
In that situation, you'll need to create a new custom field to house the data. We've created an Email Type Custom Field which will act identically to your standard Email field that you can use. :)
Hey Dan, we received Michael's reply:
"Perfect, thanks"
Just a reminder that you must be in the community to leave a comment. Please do not reply to the email notification because your comment will not get posted -- and that's the only way we can continue helping you :)
Glad to help, Michael!
I agree with Leah and Admoss3. This is a complicated hassle and used to be easy. Why do this to us? I don't think this tool will work for my company's needs if the workflow is this long and confusing for my team every time a contact has multiple e-mail addresses.
Hi Dan,
Would you let me know what you're finding confusing about the process so I can help? Once you've set up the custom fields and moved them into the About section of your record, there shouldn't be any significant different between the workflow behavior of those fields previously and their behavior now.
We need multiple email address fields, as Adrian explained above. Period.
Telling us in advance you were going to take that away would not have made this change any better. We'd have been mad sooner, that's all.
I frankly wonder if any of your product design people have ever run a business or been in sales. From the changes you've made, and the little but important things you can't do with Insightly (try sorting Opportunities by some order that WE find useful, rather than the inflexible system-designated order), I find no evidence of any sales experience on your team.
That's a big problem for us users, who are now stuck with a product that got worse in a very basic and simple way.
No apologies will be useful (unless the CEO wants to call me - maybe I could knock some sense into him), please just fix the product.
If I created a custom field with additional email address for contacts, when I track emails in Insightly would it link emails from all email addresses to the same contact entry or would it only link emails from the primary address?
Hi David,
As long as your custom field is an Email Type custom field, the email addresses you store there will link emails to that record.
@Dan P. all your (as spokesman for Insightly) explanations on behalf of deleting multiple e-mails is strange and inconsistence with the rest of Insightly. If what you state is true, why didn't you delete multiple phone-numbers???...Why dindn't you delete multiple adress fields???? ... Why didn't you delete multiple social media profiles??....... because it would be wrong for the essence of a CRM tool.
I want to find and orden al relevant communication possibilities for a person in combination with his links to functions (foundations, office etc.), projects, roles etc.. The value of your product is heavily decreased by this action. This way you force us (and our partners for who I implemented Insightly) to a tool that will meet our needs in a CRM like solve360. Creating Custom fields is from a technical point of view perhaps a solution, but not customer friendly.
I'm not interessted in explanationas why, I'm interested in when and how you will come with a solution on this issue in the next 3 months. Will there be an update that makes multiple e-mails again possible (other than custom fields)?
Hi Rob,
Unfortunately, the changes to the fields aren't reversible and we have no plans to revert the changes at any point in the future.
Our article FAQs for Insightly Field Changes explains more about these changes and why they were made.
With that said, I noticed that you still haven't used the system we added to transfer the data and fields from the created in the 3/25 update back into your account as custom fields. This tool automatically creates custom fields based on the fields that were moved, and populates those fields with the Note data. These new fields also do not count against your custom field limits.
For steps & screenshots on using the tool see How can I restore my extra field data to new custom fields?
If you prefer a video, we have that too - Tutorial: Adding Back Fields to Contacts & Orgs
Do the Social Media Profiles fields search using the alternate email address as well as the primary one?
Hey Michael,
The Social Media system only searches using the defualt email address field. Before the update, they only searched using the Email (Work) address, so this behavior is identical to the old system.
This is highly annoying. When we just did a smart merge for some contacts that had duplicate records - because they have multiple email addresses - it completely deletes the other email address. Not in a note or a custom field or anything. Plus, now as soon as we log another email message to their other address, it will again create a duplicate contact. There will be no way to stay ahead of this. It's impossible to manage contacts effectively in the world the way it is without having multiple addresses assigned for a single contact.
We generally have been happy insightly, but are worried this will make it too difficult to manage.
I must say that insightly is pretty arrogant to say that they know what their customer needs better than their customers.
And when the customers say that they want something, insightly staff tries to convince us that it they are doing this in our interest.
When people ask me what CRM we are using I tell them about insightly. How easy it is to create contacts directly from gmail. People are impressed. But when I tell them that there is a lot of duplicates because you can have just one email. Then they say that they will try something else. And I tell them that if they find another CRM, then tell me so that we can switch to.
This situation continues to be a severe problem with the system and renders Insightly into a pile of junk. Every time a person from one of my clients sends an email from an alias address it requires us to MANUALLY copy the new address into the existing record and then MANUALLY merge the two records into the original record. What moron on your product team thinks this is a reasonable user case?
How can it be possible that you provide SEVEN phone fields, but are too incompetent to handle more than one email? This is SO FRUSTRATING when Insightly used to be a sleek and effective CRM because it allowed the users to structure the system and now your product managers feel like they have to shove totally unworkable workflows down your users' throats.
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