What is Einstein Activity Capture?
Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) is a productivity-boosting tool that helps keep data between Salesforce and your emails and calendar applications up to date. It is intended to be the replacement for other tools such as Salesforce Lightning Sync.
Einstein Activity Capture editions:
- Available in: Lightning Experience
- Available with Sales Cloud in Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions
- Available with Sales Cloud Einstein, which is available for an extra cost in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions
- Available with Inbox, which is available for an extra cost in Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions
- Available with High-Velocity Sales, which is available for an extra cost in Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions
- Available with Revenue Intelligence, which is available for an extra cost in Enterprise and Unlimited Editions
To keep data up to date between applications, Einstein Activity Capture focuses on three types of data—emails, events, and contacts:
- Emails
Emails that Einstein Activity Capture users send and receive are captured and automatically added to the activity timeline of related account, contact, lead, opportunity, contract, and quote records. Email data is also used to create email insights.
Furthermore, if you use Inbox or High-Velocity Sales, email data generates engagement data. Emails sent from Salesforce go through the connected email account. - Events
Events are synced between Salesforce and users’ connected Microsoft or Google accounts. You can allow for synced events to be related to Salesforce contact and lead records.
When events move from the connected account to Salesforce, they become Salesforce records and are available in standard reporting and Salesforce Platform capabilities. Events appear on the My Events calendar in Salesforce.
Depending on your settings, events that Einstein Activity Capture users are included in getting added automatically to the activity timeline of additional records: opportunities, contracts, and quotes. - Contacts
Contacts are synced between Salesforce and users’ connected Microsoft or Google accounts. When contacts move from the connected account to Salesforce, they become Salesforce records and are available in standard reporting and Salesforce platform capabilities.
The two main functions in Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) include:
- It captures the email and events from Microsoft or Google accounts and adds them to the activity timeline of related Salesforce records. This helps to avoid manually logging activities in Salesforce. It also captures the contact data and uses them to create email insights.
- It also syncs events and contacts between Salesforce and Microsoft or Google accounts.
How can Einstein Activity Capture help businesses?
Sales reps spend most of their time on administrative tasks like logging activities and entering contacts. All these tasks take away time from more critical sales activities like developing customer relationships. Sales Cloud Einstein has a solution for this! Einstein Activity Capture is the tool to help you reduce these routine tasks.
Einstein Activity Capture works by integrating with either a Microsoft Office 365 account or a Gmail account. Once an email account has been set up, Einstein Activity Capture will start logging emails and events associated with the account into Amazon Web Services (AWS). The question here is — why Amazon Web Services and not Salesforce? Below are some reasons why the data is not stored directly in Salesforce:
- The tool can log emails from six months back for Gmail and two years back for Microsoft.
- Einstein Activity Capture captures and syncs incoming and outgoing emails and events into the Activity Timeline, which provides a log of every interaction with any given customer.
- Emails and events are categorized by the tool into the following Salesforce records:
- Leads
- Contacts
- Accounts
- Person Accounts
- Opportunities
See below a video on how to sync your email and calendar with Einstein Activity Capture.
If you have any sensitive information that you do not wish to share with everyone, fortunately, EAC gives you the ability to control which activities are added to Salesforce and who can see them. You can update these controls at any time either from Salesforce or your inbox.
Einstein Automated Contacts uses email and event activity to find new contacts and opportunity contact roles to add to Salesforce. Depending on how the admin sets up the feature, Einstein can suggest the new data or add it automatically.
When the new data is suggested to reps, they can easily add it to Salesforce with just a couple of clicks.
When the new data is added to Salesforce automatically, reps are notified when Einstein adds new data. And for new contacts, a list view shows them which contacts were added by Einstein.
Why should you use Einstein Activity Capture?
Einstein Activity Capture is very similar to Lightning Sync, in that it connects to Gmail or Office 365 and is quite user-friendly. Also, it has one significant advantage over Lightning – emails are captured automatically, and it’s relatively easy to set up and operate in EAC. That means sales reps do not have to log activities manually. Hence, save so much time and are able to focus on more important activities for the day.
EAC might work well for you if your organisation:
- Doesn’t need customised sync settings and you only intend to use it for standard Einstein activity.
- Isn’t interested in producing a summary of sales activities or a standard Salesforce report of all synced activities.
- Is set up with Sales Cloud Einstein, as EAC is packaged with it.
However, depending on your requirements, you might need to purchase the full version since the free version has some limitations. For instance, the free version does not include the full activity dashboard for activity metrics. You will have access to read-only mode for up to nine days of data instead. The full version costs $50 per month.