Einstein Activity Capture for Salesforce is a powerful add-on to the Salesforce suite that many sales organizations leverage to automate data capture. Marc Benioff, CEO at Salesforce.com, is investing heavily into the Einstein Analytics platform and expects it to be one of the main drivers of future revenue growth. Benioff envisions Einstein Analytics having “a seat at the table” when making big decisions for his company.
“Benioff said that after he has worked around his room of executives he then quizzes his AI assistant. “I ask Einstein, ‘I heard what everybody said but what do you actually think?’”
There is no question that predictive analytics based on artificial intelligence could be immensely powerful when integrated into a CRM and forecasting tool like Salesforce. In addition to using Einstein to help with sales forecasting, Benioff envisions the platform used across the CRM platform to automate workflows and to analyze your sales pipeline.
Einstein Activity Capture Explained
Einstein Activity Capture is an application that allows users to sync calendar, email, and Salesforce. This tool works in two ways, 1) syncing contacts and events between your Google and Microsoft accounts and Salesforce, 2) capturing events and emails from your Google or Microsoft account and then adds this to the timeline activity of any records that are related in Salesforce. Having this data added automatically saves the sales rep time and energy by not having to manually enter them.
The two “syncing” elements work together. It first captures the data and holds it for a short time so that the user can both view it, affirm it and then sync it – and then stores the data in the CRM.
While this sounds good its not as turnkey as it might sound. Einstein Activity Capture does take configuration and setup that involves your IT department and time with your Salesforce.com administrator.
Activity Capture Considerations
There are a few technical restrictions and considerations that you need to be aware of before fully deciding on this tool. Below are a few listed but there are more than can be discussed in future articles.
- Einstein Activity Capture is supported in sandbox environments but the sync itself isn’t. After initially setting up Einstein Activity Capture in a sandbox, anytime the sandbox has a refresh it turns off activity capture and deletes all connected accounts from the sandbox itself.
- Einstein Activity Capture capture events and emails by default. Depending on your goals, you might not want everything synced at once. You must decide whether to sync events and contacts and what direction they are to go in.
- Activities and events that are added to Salesforce using Einstein Activity Capture are stored outside of Salesforce (in AWS, for example) and does not impact Salesforce data allocations. This may or may not be advantageous for you.
- Calendar Events that are recurring are not synced.
- To have access to the Activities dashboard, API access is now required. If you are a Salesforce Essentials user, you cannot access the Activities dashboard because API access is not accessible.
If you are looking for an alternative more compatible Salesforce Solution that stores your ALL OF YOUR calendar, event, task, activity and contact data in Salesforce natively take a peek at SalesDirector.ai’s AutoScribe.
This automated activity capture tool ensures your CRM is up-to-date so that your entire customer-facing organization including marketing, customer success, customer service and sales are all on the same page.
What About Salesforce Inbox and Lightning Sync?
As of Winter 2021, Lightning Sync will not be available in Lightning for new Salesforce customers. Einstein Activity Capture is Salesforce’s long term solution for syncing contacts and events between Microsoft and Google applications with Salesforce. As Salesforce continues to push customers to Einstein Activity Capture be aware of the limitations listed above in this article. If you are still on an older version of Salesforce and are using Salesforce Inbox keep in mind that your users are still manually linking emails to records in Salesforce.
Below is a comparison graphic of SalesDirector.ai’s platform and Einstein Activity Capture with Salesforce.