Einstein Activity Capture seems a reasonable choice to anyone seeking to connect Salesforce and Outlook. But is this native solution from Salesforce the best option for your organization?
In this article we will review the benefits of Einstein Activity Capture, Salesforce Inbox, discuss their advantages and disadvantages, how EAC and Salesforce Inbox complement each other, analyze the best use cases for EAC and Inbox, and when your business should look for alternatives.
Einstein Activity Capture overview: What is it and how does it work?
The growing need to integrate email and CRM
In today’s dynamic business landscape, where every second counts and efficiency reigns supreme, organizations are constantly seeking ways to streamline their operations and grow sales.
This is why capturing sales activity data in CRM has become increasingly important for business success. But often, this requires manual data entry by customer-facing teams, which takes their time and focus away from acquiring prospects and interacting with customers.
To harness the full potential of one’s business, integrating CRM (Salesforce) and email (Outlook) seamlessly and automating sales teams’ work is crucial. This is where things can become tricky, as it’s important to choose the right solution for your organization needs.
Tools like Einstein Activity Capture help organizations solve this problem.
What is Einstein Activity Capture?
Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) helps connect data between Salesforce and email and calendar applications, focusing on three types of records—emails, events, and contacts.
Following the retirement of the Salesforce for Outlook connector, EAC is promoted by Salesforce as its next alternative.
How does Einstein Activity Capture Work?
Emails, events, and contacts are synced between Salesforce and users’ connected Microsoft or Google accounts. After connecting an email account, EAC logs emails and events associated with the account into Salesforce managed data centers hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Since late 2023, Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture data and services are being migrated to Hyperforce, based on a new AWS public cloud infrastructure.
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, and, if you use Inbox or Sales Engagement, email data generates engagement data. Events are synced between Salesforce and users’ connected Microsoft or Google accounts and can be related to Salesforce contact and lead records.
Depending on settings, events captured by Einstein Activity Capture can be automatically added to the activity timeline of additional records: opportunities, contracts, and quotes.
Recommended reading: Einstein Activity Capture Alternative
Salesforce Inbox: What is it and how does it work?
We can’t speak about Einstein Activity Capture and not mention Salesforce Inbox, as these two solutions complete each other and are often sold as a bundle.
What is Salesforce Inbox?
Salesforce Inbox is an email productivity tool that integrates with email clients like Outlook or Gmail, bringing Salesforce features directly into users’ inboxes. When connected with Outlook, Salesforce Inbox suggests the following benefits:
- streamlining email management,
- enhancing sales effectiveness and workflows,
- optimizing productivity, and
- improving engagement with customers.
Salesforce Inbox for Outlook
Salesforce Inbox allows users to access Salesforce data and features directly within their email client via an integrated side panel. Users can track email opens, clicks, and responses in real-time, gaining insights into recipient engagement. Additionally, via EAC, email interactions are logged in Salesforce and associated with relevant records.
Sales teams and advisors benefit from pre-built email templates and sequences, enabling them to send personalized and consistent communications more easily.
Salesforce Inbox also facilitates calendar and task integration directly from the email client. As a result, teams can stay organized, never miss important engagements, and improve collaboration and accountability.
Recommended reading: Salesforce Inbox Alternative
Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox features
Let’s take a closer look at the available functionalities in more detail.
Contact and lead integration
Solutions like Einstein Activity Capture synchronize contacts and leads between Salesforce and Oulook into a comprehensive 360 view, ensuring that vital customer information is up to date across platforms.
This empowers sales teams to make informed decisions and tailor their approach to individual clients, ultimately driving business growth.
Email tracking and logging
Capturing email activity into Salesforce provides valuable insights into customer engagement.
Effectively track and log emails to the relevant Salesforce records, and consolidate activity data into actionable insights, so teams are empowered to amplify customer lifetime value.
Calendar integration
Syncing calendars between Salesforce and Outlook allows users to manage their schedules seamlessly, enhance communication and collaboration, and improve their productivity.
Whether it’s scheduling appointments, setting reminders, or coordinating meetings, calendar integration ensures that everyone stays on the same page.
CRM-powered inbox side panel
Salesforce records are seamlessly accessible through the Outlook side panel, so sales teams benefit from up-to-date Customer 360 in the workflow of their system of action.
Side panels solutions like Salesforce Inbox help streamline workflows as employees can easily capture and update customer information into Salesforce, saving time and ensuring data accuracy across the organization.
Integrated scheduling and Sales Engagement capabilities*
By integrating scheduling and sales engagement capabilities in Outlook, sellers and advisors are empowered to carry out their work directly within the email environment.
Scheduling meetings, inserting email templates for personalized follow-ups, and leveraging customer insights help enhance productivity and strengthen relationships for business growth. | (*when available)
Einstein Activity Capture vs Salesforce Inbox: brief comparison
While both Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox aim to streamline sales processes and enhance productivity within Salesforce, they differ in their specific functionalities and focus areas.
EAC automates the capture and logging of user interactions into Salesforce, while Salesforce Inbox provides a suite of productivity tools within users’ email clients to improve email management and sales effectiveness.
Einstein Activity Capture vs Salesforce Inbox functionality: Brief overview
In the table below, we have provided a brief overview of Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture vs Inbox functionality.
| Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) | Salesforce Inbox | |
| FOCUS | EAC automates the capture and logging of user interactions, such as emails, meetings, and calls, from Outlook or Gmail to Salesforce. Its primary goal is to streamline data entry tasks and ensure that valuable interaction data is accurately recorded in Salesforce. | Salesforce Inbox is a productivity tool designed to enhance email management and sales effectiveness within the Salesforce ecosystem. Its focus is on streamlining sales workflows, improving productivity, and enhancing engagement with customers by providing tools for efficient email communication and task management. |
| FUNCTIONALITIES | EAC monitors inbox interactions, captures relevant data, and logs it into Salesforce. EAC associate interactions with the appropriate Salesforce records, providing users with a comprehensive view of customer interactions without manual data entry. | Inbox brings Salesforce features directly into the users’ email clients. Inbox provides features like email tracking and logging, email templates and sequences, calendar integration, and task management, all within the email client interface. |
Is Einstein Activity Capture a good choice for your business?
While Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox offer valuable capabilities for streamlining sales workflows and enhancing productivity, organizations should carefully consider their limitations and suitability for their specific needs before implementation.
We recommend evaluating the following essential factors when leveraging solutions within the Salesforce ecosystem:
- Configurations requirements,
- Integration sync complexity,
- Compliance considerations.
When you should choose EAC
While both Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) and Salesforce Inbox offer valuable functionalities, they also have their limitations and may not be the best fit for your organization.
Let’s look at whether your business can benefit from EAC or may want to look elsewhere.
EAC and Inbox might work well for you if your organization:
- Works mostly with high volume and low value customers that can easily be automated.
- Has simple, replicable processes that don’t require customized sync settings.
- Doesn’t rely on time-sensitive customer interactions.
- Deals with non-sensitive data so security or compliance is not a priority.
- Isn’t interested in summarizing sales activities into standard Salesforce reports.
- Is set up (and satisfied) with Sales Cloud Einstein, as EAC is packaged with it.
When you should look for Einstein Activity Capture alternatives
On the other hand, due to Salesforce Einstein Activity Capture limitations, your organization may need to look beyond EAC and Inbox if the following applies to your business:
- You rely on complex processes
- You require real-time sync at scale
- You prioritize privacy and compliance
- Your teams hate toggling between applications
Let’s address each item in more detail.
- You rely on complex processes
Organizations with complex, custom processes require flexible solutions tailored to their unique workflows.
Solutions like Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) and Salesforce Inbox have limited configurability, so without advanced options to align with specific business rules and dependencies, these native solutions may fall short in addressing the complex needs of such organizations, necessitating more customizable alternatives.
- You require real-time sync at scale
Organizations needing real-time calendar sync at scale may find solutions like Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) unsuitable due to sync lag and scalability issues. EAC’s automated data capture processes struggle to keep pace with high volumes of calendar events, leading to delays in synchronization and potentially outdated information and misaligned calendars.
In scenarios where real-time updates are critical for scheduling and coordination, these sync lags can lead to double bookings, disrupting workflows and hindering productivity.
- You prioritize privacy and compliance
In organizations with stringent privacy and compliance requirements, especially in regulated industries, solutions like Einstein Activity Capture or Salesforce Inbox don’t always deliver.
The automated data capture through EAC raises concerns about the inadvertent collection or sharing of sensitive information, leading to possible breach of regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. EAC and Inbox struggle to offer the required robust – yet configurable – access controls and customization capabilities, sturdy encryption, and audit trails.
- Your teams hate toggling between applications
Many organizations see their sales teams or advisors do the bulk of their work in Outlook – requiring advanced scheduling and sales engagement capabilities integrated into their email platform to succeed. In addition, enterprises demand configurability to align with their unique workflows.
While Salesforce Inbox offers some productivity features, its lack of configurability hinders organizations from tailoring these capabilities to their specific needs within Outlook, especially as some features are only accessible or configurable in Salesforce.
If the above applies to your organization, we recommend looking for a more advanced solution, in order to avoid Einstein Activity Capture limitations.
Why Riva is the best alternative to Einstein Activity Capture and Salesforce Inbox
Like Einstein Activity Capture, Riva brings together CRM, email, calendar, tasks, and connects platforms, allowing access to customer data when and where it’s needed. Sellers can view, update, and leverage CRM data directly in an Outlook side panel to more easily interact with customers.
But Riva Activity Capture goes beyond the basics and delivers an enterprise-grade relationship platform designed to stand up to stringent regulated industries’ requirements, which can be the missing piece for your organization if you’re looking for.
- The most convenient Outlook side panel
Customer-facing teams and advisors do most of their work out of Outlook – and are always looking for ways to do more without context switching.
Riva Insight makes CRM data living in the inbox a reality. Sellers can not only surface and edit customer details without ever leaving their email, but with My Day, they are also empowered to see upcoming appointments and deadlines at-a-glance. This eliminates context switching, boosts productivity, and ensures teams are always prepared for every customer interaction.
- Versatility and configurability
Any organization dealing with high-value clients also must handle complex workflows and lengthy sales processes – which is only successfully achievable with a solution that offers high configurability.
Riva offers multiple levels of data access and storage with role-based configurations – even for the Insight side panel – to ensure data gets to the right place and the right people.
Custom field and object sync and mapping are also included out-of-the-box to adapt to sophisticated business rules and sales processes.
- Real-time calendar sync at scale
Delayed calendar sync disrupts scheduling, leading to conflicts and missed appointments, hampering productivity.
Riva offers real-time, bi-directional customer data flow between apps at scale, with proven deployments of over 5000 simultaneous users, ensuring improved collaboration, more seized opportunities, and higher revenue.
- Ironclad data security and compliance
Riva has over a decade of experience with regulated industries, including 200+ blue chip financial services enterprises. Riva meets the strictest data governance requirements, proven through many third-party certifications – including being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant for years.
Riva keeps you compliant with infosec requirements and industry regulations and makes sure your sensitive data like Material Non-Public Information (MNPI) is always secure and protected. With Riva you can rest assured that your data is in safe hands.
- Integrated meeting scheduling and sales engagement
As stated above, sellers thrive in Outlook, yet their efficiency suffer when the required tools for their jobs live in various platforms they must juggle between.
Riva solves for this by offering advanced integrated meeting scheduling and sales engagement capabilities, including AI-powered email templates, multi-channel cadences, meeting scheduling availability links, and more. With these features directly in the inbox, sellers save time, ensure consistency, drive productivity and business growth, and strengthen customer relationships seamlessly.
Learn more about Riva Engine.
What you can expect when successfully integrating CRM and email
Being able to consolidate the data into reports that inform good, data-driven decisions can be the tipping point between getting ahead and falling behind.
Therefore organizations – whatever their size or industry – will experience multiple benefits when integrating Salesforce and Outlook with EAC or a similar solution, while the main ones are as follows:
Enhanced productivity and effortless collaboration
Integrating Salesforce with Outlook eliminates the need to toggle between multiple applications, enabling sales and support teams to streamline their workflows and foster collaboration as they can share critical information in real-time.
With customer data synchronized between Salesforce and Outlook, sale teams and advisors can access vital information without switching contexts. Collaboration barriers are dismantled, paving the way for greater synergy and a boost in productivity thanks to Outlook integration and Einstein Activity Capture or a similar solution.
Unified, accurate customer view
By syncing emails, contacts, and calendar events between Salesforce and Outlook, organizations can maintain a unified view of customer interactions – often referred to as a single source of truth.
Automating the process of capturing and updating customer data saves teams time while empowering them to avoid discrepancies, ensuring data integrity across platforms. This holistic perspective empowers teams to deliver personalized experiences and nurture client relationships more effectively.
Time and budget saved
Needless to say, automating manual tasks allows organizations to save time and costs.
According to the Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study for Riva by Forrester Consulting, organizations with billions in annual revenue and hundreds of client-facing team members with large portfolios and high revenue goals can see the following benefits when implementing Riva:
Summary
Choosing a native Salesforce connector, like Einstein Activity Capture or Salesforce Inbox might seem like a reasonable choice, however due to certain limitations, they will not work best for every organization. It’s important to bear in mind that picking the right solution for your company depends on multiple factors and priorities.
We hope that this article was helpful to shed lights on the basics offered by Einstein Activity capture, along with its advantages and disadvantages, and available alternatives. Now you can make an informed decision on whether EAC limitations may be deal-breakers for your business.
Riva Activity Capture is a more advanced and secure alternative to EAC and Inbox, which was created specifically for regulated industries like financial services. Please contact us to learn how Riva can help your organization.
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