Lately, many of our customers have been asking us how they can integrate their Gmail and Outlook email apps with Salesforce. 

When customer email conversations are properly associated with the Salesforce records, such an integration allows the business to have a fuller view of the customer journey both from the sales side and the support side. Additionally, the integration benefits the sales and service representatives, increasing their productivity by allowing them to spend less time entering data and switching between the email app and Salesforce. It allows the reps to access important Outlook/Gmail messages and relevant Salesforce records all in one place, so they can focus on what matters most. 

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Both Salesforce and its AppExchange partners provide ways to accomplish this. However, many of our customers are not aware of the Einstein Activity Capture feature - one of the latest email-app-to-Salesforce integration features from Salesforce. 

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The basics of Einstein Activity Capture

This feature compliments the existing Outlook/Gmail plugin which integrates with Salesforce nicely.  Einstein Activity Capture enables you to automatically sync the contacts that you have in your email apps and Salesforce by email address. If found, the plugin will map the two contacts to each other and begin to sync the email email conversation. It also synchronizes calendar events from your Outlook/Gmail to Salesforce Calendar, altogether eliminating the need to manually add such contacts, emails, or events to Salesforce. 

Moreover, with this plugin, a rep can send an email from Salesforce and it will arrive in the customer’s inbox with the corresponding rep email address. This is ideal, instead of having those cryptic email addresses generated by Salesforce (see image below). A rep email address increases customer confidence that the email has actually been sent from that rep, and not from some kind of robot/automation. 

When scheduling a meeting with a customer, the rep might find it easier to create the event directly from the email calendar.  This is because the rep can see a full view of his/her schedule. However, if this meeting is not added to Salesforce, the company will never have a full view of its customer activity.

Einstein Activity Capture ensures that the meeting information is added to the customer record and also to the rep’s Salesforce calendar. Now, the rep no longer has to worry about manually adding the meeting event to Salesforce. 

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Our main takeaway

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Einstein Activity Capture is simple to implement with only four quick steps to follow from the main screen – providing basic information, configuring the sync settings, reviewing the advanced settings, and completing the user and profile assignments. The service is available without any additional cost for Sales Cloud Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions in Lightning Experience.  There is an extra cost to acquire enhanced features like data retention of up to five years rather than six months. 

For those interested in Einstein Activity Capture, we highly recommend that you evaluate and review its limitations before implementing the service.

If you need assistance in evaluating and implementing Einstein Activity Capture, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by filling out the form below.

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