TAP has a limited amount of time before deciding whether to pursue a new Outlook integration product for Salesforce. If TAP does want to choose a new integration product then additional considerations need to be made around using the Salesforce Activity object vs the Affinaquest Activity Report object for logging interactions with alumni/donors/prospects. Choosing not to replace the Outlook integration will mean that the 60+ DOs and 4 RMs would need to manually log all of their email interactions through the current Activity Report process which can take between 2-5 minutes for generic reach outs.
Salesforce for Outlook retirement
As mentioned in the SF Winter '24 release session, the Salesforce for Outlook feature that we're currently using will be retired in June 2024. TAP is currently using this feature to sync their emails from Outlook to Salesforce with just a few clicks, you can find the training guide here .
Salesforce has new offerings to replace this legacy product, one of which is Einstein Activity Capture (EAC), for which we've already got 100 licenses in our existing Salesforce licensing.
AQ Activity Reports vs SF Activity
The barrier to switching over to Einstein Activity Capture is TAP's use of the Affinaquest Activity Report functionality instead of the native Salesforce Activity object. AQ has duplicated the SF Activity product because the SF Activity object automatically archives its data after 1 year, we can request and extension of up to 10 years if we can show a strong business reason for storing data for such an extended period.
The SF Activity object is more streamlined and embedded in native functionality. This applies to the Einstein Activity Capture product, it will only create SF Activity records, not AQ Activity Report records. If we wish to use EAC, TAP needs to consider whether it wants to add significant customisation to duplicate the SF Activity into AQ Activity Reports (as we've done to use the current Salesforce for Outlook). I'd strongly recommend against that as AQ Activity Reports offer very little benefit to TAP and lock us out of using powerful tools like the Pipeline Inspector, native reporting functions, and ultimately will leave us out of any SF AI products like Sales GPT.
Migrating to SF Activity
Moving to SF Activity will require a reasonable amount of preparation to avoid data loss and support change management. Some of the key actions that will be needed for this migration include:
Map the fields we want to keep from AQ Activity Reports to SF Activities. There should be a review of existing business processes and what value it adds eg the Substantive Activity field on the AQ Activity Report has no definition and causes a great deal of confusion to DOs as it impacts their KPIs.
Review the existing Activity Report data. There are over 350k Activity Reports and there are data issues such as date fields from as early as 1939 because of the way the PG team used the date field to show the date of the executed Probate instead of the date of communication. Other examples include Activity Reports that should clearly be in campaigns eg on 29/9/21 an invite for a webinar was added as an Activity Report instead of as a campaign.
Clean the fields on the existing Tasks and Activity objects. In the 2 years since go live teams such as CG, PG, GA, and GI have added ad hoc fields that will not be relevant to most users. These fields should be assessed and possibly used in different record types or limited to just users with specific profiles or permissions.
Revert the changes to page layouts that AQ made to remove the SF Activity buttons from Opportunities, Contacts, and Accounts. This work is tedious and should be listed out for each page layout where the AQ Activity Report needs to be switched to the SF Activity because it will be very easy to miss quick action buttons that need to be changed.
Impact on Business
Activity Reports are currently a core part of the DOs KPIs. Most have a KPI around 100+ Activity Reports with the Substantive Activity flag each year. Having an Outlook integration reduces the time required to log each email and is especially helpful for the initial meeting request and introduction emails as DOs rarely need to add additional notes like they would after a meeting. There have been 15,690 Activity Reports created this year, 2,390 of these are Introduction and Meeting Requests.
When the Salesforce for Outlook feature does retire in June, DOs and RMs will still be able to log their emails manually. I walked around the office this morning and asked DOs to estimate how long it takes them to log an Activity Report. Most said between 2-5 minutes for logging an email manually or a quick call and 10-15 minutes for a face-to-face meeting report. Many also admitted that they were failing to add most of their initial meeting request or introduction emails because it isn't directly reflected in their KPIs. Omitting these reach outs has significant impacts on other TAP teams like PD or ASE who are unable to measure how effective their leads are because there's no interaction data to report on.
If you're curious, I took some screen shots on the process for logging a SF Activity vs an AQ Activity Report. The process for logging an AQ Activity is more streamlined but can still have customisation added if there are fields TAP absolutely want to add in. The time and complexity for logging an interaction will be significantly lower for most scenarios.
Next Steps
TAP needs to decide whether or not to prioritise preparing for a new Outlook integration product.