What Is Einstein Activity Capture Limitations?

Customer Relationship Management software is now a crucial application for most businesses. According to a recent survey, 91% of companies that have at least 11 employees or more use a CRM system, and nearly 33% of these organizations consider Salesforce as their go-to software application. But why Salesforce? Salesforce comes with a data-capturing tool, Einstein Activity Capture, that extracts essential information from calendars and emails. 

How does the Einstein Activity Capture work?

The Einstein Activity Capture is integrated with either a Gmail account or Microsoft Office 365 account. After you set up the account, the tool will start capturing events and dates from emails and conversations associated with the respective account into your Amazon Web Services. It categorizes the events and emails according to the opportunities that they can create, accounts of important people, customer accounts, contacts on your list, and leads that may convert into customers.

Why use Einstein Activity Capture?

EAC is like most of the automation tools that you see these days. It saves plenty of time since you don’t have to manually keep track of important dates and events. This tool can come in handy if you don’t want to keep any active data that’s more than 6 months old. 

This software application allows you to analyze different business activities in your Salesforce account. However, you need to remember that it’s a premium feature, meaning you need to pay additional subscription fees to enjoy this function. 

Limitations of Einstein Activity Capture

Although the Einstein Activity Capture tool is helpful for many business owners, it has certain limitations. These limitations are holding back its popularity, and if Salesforce can work on them, it can become a renowned application for companies. Here are a few drawbacks of EAC that you should know about before using it:

• First of all, it doesn’t offer as many customization options that its competitors provide. This can be frustrating if you have specific syncing requirements for different emails and events. Moreover, it doesn’t allow you to smart link your affiliate contacts, meaning you have to set up a new process altogether. The Opportunities tab syncs the emails related to your Opportunity Team. This means your external partners working in the same team would get their emails synced, which may not be necessary. Unfortunately, this is a default setting and you can’t change it.
• EAC also doesn’t support custom objects. If you email a custom object from your account, it will first get logged onto the activity timeline of your associated contact. This isn’t a feature that you may always like, especially when you are sending official emails to your potential clients.
• Another drawback that Salesforce needs to work on is its data-storage facility. EAC will not store your activity data in Salesforce. Instead, it logs all the data in Amazon Web Services. This becomes a thorn in your flesh if you want to track customer activities and accordingly prepare reports for your next sales or marketing campaign. The reports may be essential to plan your revenue operations, but since they are not available on your Salesforce account, it would take a longer time to extract them from Amazon Web Services and then use them in your presentation.

Salesforce allows you to merely view the activity data on its Activity Stream. However, you will not be able to add the data or download it. Imagine manually typing the data and spending hours preparing the reports. It defeats the purpose of using the tool in the first place. 

Using Einstein Activity Capture for free

When it comes to Einstein Activity Capture limitations, another thing that you need to remember is the cost involved in using the application. You may want to get your feet wet by using the free version of the software first. But the features available in the free version are so limited that you may not want to use it further. For example, you wouldn’t be able to use all the functions available on the activity dashboard. Using the read-only mode may not be helpful for your business. If you want to switch to the full version, you need to pay $50 per month.

The Einstein Activity Capture limitations show that Salesforce still needs to work on this application to make it popular among business owners. Although it looks promising, it needs to rectify its drawbacks to compete with other automation tools in the market.