Considerations for EAC Email Sync

This topic discusses the implications of syncing email from an GMail or Office 365 inbox to Salesforce Accounts or Contacts using Salesforce’s Einstein Activity Capture (EAC).

How Salesforce EAC Email Sync works

When an individual who has been granted EAC Email Sync permissions and has agreed to EAC Email Sync occurring, email from their email inbox is captured and transported to a Salesforce Einstein server.

There the Einstein server examines the email to see if there is any Account or Contact related to this email.

How EAC matches emails with Accounts and Contacts

If a Personal Account has an email address, EAC will match any email to or from this email address with the Account.

If there is no Account match, it will attempt to match against a Contact’s email address. This is likely in the case of Business Accounts, which by default have no personal email addresses.

There are other matching strategies, including matching against Opportunities if you’re using Franchise Recruitment, but these are the most common.

When the Einstein server makes a match, it stores the email within the Einstein Activity Capture storage.

Any email stored within Einstein Activity Capture will appear within the Activity Panel of one or more Salesforce records. Despite being displayed in the record’s Activity Panel, these emails are never actually stored in Salesforce. They are instead stored within Einstein Activity Capture and are only displayed in Salesforce.

All emails stored within EAC are discarded after a period of time. As of the time of writing, free EAC accounts retain email for six months and paid versions retain email for 18 months. Salesforce do not provide an option to retain emails indefinitely.

Considerations for using EAC with Franchise Recruitment

If you are using Franchise Recruitment independently of Operations Management or Business Management, then you need to be mindful that:

  • EAC will capture email against related Leads, Contacts, Opportunities and Accounts

  • each individual has the choice of allowing captured emails to be seen in Salesforce only by themselves or to be shared with everyone having access to the Salesforce record

  • free versions of EAC retain emails for around six months, so this is suitable for relatively brief sales cycles but may not be suitable for extended cycles or repeated sales

If you’re also using Operations Management and Business Management, you also need to be mindful of considerations for those applications.

Considerations using EAC with Operations Management

By design, the location intended for storing pertinent business correspondence are a Management Log associated with a particular franchisee. Management Logs are a custom object introduced by Franchise Cloud Solutions.

By design, EAC matches emails only against standard Salesforce objects (e.g. Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities). Salesforce’s EAC provides no means to configure matching against custom objects (such as Management Logs or Audits).

Further, if you have granted franchisees access to the system (whether that be through Business Management, Partner Portal or Mobile licenses) they will be able to view the Franchise Profile Account. If anyone in a head office team are having confidential discussions with or about a franchisee, it is likely that email will be captured and stored on the Franchise Profile Account, which the franchisee has access to. This lack of privacy of confidential information is a significant negative consideration for any Franchise Cloud Solutions customer whose franchisees access Salesforce.

However, you can mitigate this by excluding emails that only involve email participants within specified domains. See the Salesforce documentation for Excluded Addresses.

Emails captured and stored by EAC are also transient. This works against one of the crucial functions of Operations Management, which is to maintain a history of interactions with franchisees across the course of their franchise agreement.

Emails captured and stored by Einstein Activity Capture cannot be reported on by standard Salesforce reports.

For these reasons, we consider it inadvisable to configure EAC for head office users where any franchisee has login access. Those organizations who plan to never allow franchisee access to Salesforce still need to be mindful of the email discard timeframes and consider whether this makes EAC suitable or unsuitable for use.

For those organizations who decide EAC is unsuitable, we do have a recommended alternative.

Recommendation for Operations Management users

We recommend an alternative way of storing Office 365 or Gmail emails in Salesforce. Salesforce offer an extension, available for

  • Outlook in Office 365, and

  • Gmail when used with the Chrome browser

which provides manual control as to which emails are stored in Salesforce.

This recommendation has practical advantages of

  • allowing users to choose which emails are captured

  • storing the email directly within Salesforce and thus not subject to being discarded

  • being able to report on email stored within Salesforce

  • allowing users to file emails against the records of their choice, including and especially within Management Logs

For more information about the Salesforce extension, see topics on the Salesforce extension within the Franchise Recruitment User Guide’s Customer Communications chapter.

Considerations using EAC for Business Management

While Franchise Cloud Solutions recommend franchisees deploy the Salesforce extension to Office 365 or the Chrome Salesforce extension for GSuite, some organizations may still prefer to deploy EAC for users on an EAC Business Management license. If this is the case, the following considerations need to be borne in mind:

  • EAC will capture against related Contacts and Accounts, but will not relate an email to a Job

  • EAC will store emails only against records that the user has access to, so there is no problem if unrelated franchisees happen to have clients with similar or identical information

  • EAC-captured emails are transient, and will automatically disappear after six months (free version) or 18 months (paid version)

  • Franchisees can productively share their emails with everyone; if they choose to share only with themselves or without groups, it may be possible that head office employees won’t have visibility into those emails

If you’re also using EAC for Recruitment or Operations Management, you also need to be mindful of considerations for those applications.