First, what is Activity Capture? Its the act of taking communication data such as email, calendar events, and contacts and adding them to your CRM. CRM is your system of record and in the best of all worlds you really want to maintain a healthy CRM so you know about your customers and what is going on with them.
Salesforce has a variety of tools to deal with this including: Salesforce Chrome Extension, Salesforce Outlook Extension, Salesforce Inbox, Salesforce BCC, Salesforce Sync and Einstein Activity Capture. All of them except for Einstein Activity Capture are designed so that the Salesrep must take additional action to log this activity. For example, in order to log an email to your Salesforce, these extensions will require the rep to click “Send and log” vs just “Send” when sending an email. This requires an additional step and unless you use this consistently will only capture a subset of your communications. Now, these extensions are quite useful for other things such as searching Salesforce, finding related contacts, etc…
This leads us to talk about the philosophy of these tools. Salesforce seems to take a helper tool approach with these Browser or Outlook Extensions. Also mostly Client Side, as in something for the end user to install on their machine/mobile device.
While SalesDirector.ai’s Autoscribe product takes a hands off, pure backoffice service approach (No Client Side Addins). The Autoscribe service does virtually everything through automation and has no user interface. This means that salesreps just go about their business and Contacts, Email and Events magically just show up in Salesforce.
High Level Differences Between Salesforce’s Activity Capture and Salesdirector.ai’s Autoscribe
| Salesforce’s Activity Capture | SalesDirector.ai’s AutoScribe | |
| Technology | Mostly Client Side | Server to Server |
| User Interface | Requires “Tagging” | None |
| Change Management | Yes | None |
Since the Salesforce approach is more a manual one with Helper Tools, we actually would recommend that you use SalesDirector.ai’s Autoscribe background service WITH the Salesforce Helper tools (Salesforce Inbox, Chrome Extension or Outlook Extension) to streamline other aspects of Salespeople’s jobs such as Event Scheduling or Salesforce search within Outlook.
Want to learn more? Talk to one of our Consultants on how you can keep your CRM Evergreen without burdening your reps.