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Should you go with Einstein Activity Capture or not?

A feature available on Salesforce, Einstein Activity Capture connects your emails and calendar events from your Office 365 and Google accounts and adds them to the activity timeline of the related Salesforce records. Also syncing all your team’s customer communications automatically, Einstein Activity Capture eliminates the need to enter all your activities in Salesforce manually. But should you even go for Einstein Activity Capture?

Here we give you some information on the limitations of Einstein Activity Capture as well as the benefits of Einstein Activity Capture so you can make an informed decision. But before going into the pros and cons of Einstein Activity Capture, let’s look at what it can do.

What does Einstein Activity Capture do?

Acting much like Lightning Sync, Einstein Activity Capture connects to your Gmail or Office 365 accounts. Thereafter, it will automatically capture events and add to the correct records in Salesforce. It will also capture all your inbound and outbound emails and makes them visible in your Activity Timeline. This way, you don’t need to manually enable the logging or enter any data.

Einstein Activity Capture can:

  • Sync Email and Calendar automatically
  • Capture all emails and meetings created in your email account
  • Report activity
  • Provide data-driven coaching to reps with an activity leaderboard
  • Set up quickly and easily
  • Simply just connect to Gmail and Office 365 and EAC will do the rest
  • Control privacy
  • Change who can see your emails and events

Now, over to the benefits.

Benefits of Einstein Activity Capture

Apart from working in the background Einstein Activity Capture has a few cool tricks up its sleeve.

Email Insights. As the email data in EAC is processed by the Einstein AI layer, it offers some useful information about the email you’ve logged and suggests the next action based on the email content. It also helps you craft a more tailored response to your client.

Send Email Directly. While sending emails through Salesforce, they are sent from its servers which give an “on behalf of” text in the ‘From’ field. This can affect your deliverability. Einstein Activity Capture allows emails from Salesforce to be sent directly from the connected account.

Recommended Actions. This functionality shows important connections within your networks. It also shows the number of interactions you’ve had with a Lead or Contact so that you can decide whether to continue managing the relationship or close the deal.

Activity Metrics. Salesforce analyzes your activity data using Einstein AI. And henceforth, it calculates some interesting metrics, like Last Activity Date, Last Call Date, Inactive Days, etc.

Activities Dashboard. A summary of sales activities that are added to Salesforce manually is shown in EAC’s Activity Dashboard. These metrics can be accessed through the Analytics app in Setup.

And now, the limitations.

Limitations of Einstein Activity Capture

There are a few drawbacks as well to Einstein Activity Capture that you should know.

  1. All the activities captured by Einstein Activity Capture are stored outside Salesforce. They are housed in a server outside of Salesforce which may have a whole different host of issues.
  2. Activities cannot be reported on the standard Salesforce reports.
  3. You will not be able to delete emails from Einstein Activity Capture. And if you wish to, it must be performed by a System Administrator.
  4. If you move away from Einstein Activity Capture in the future and deactivate its services, all the activities captured by Einstein Activity Capture will no longer be displayed in record timelines!
  5. The captured activity data stored and displayed is only a maximum of 24 months.
  6. For activities, you must use the Activity Timeline only, not the Related List view.
  7. The emails from your internal domain are not associated with Salesforce records. This is the case irrespective of your Excluded Addresses settings.
  8. Platform Encryption is not supported. Hence the emails and events added to Salesforce are not encrypted at rest but when in transit.
  9. Recurring events are not synced.

So, now you can determine whether to pull the trigger on Einstein Activity Capture or not!