Everyone wants a fully automatic email integration solution because it saves time and effort. Sales reps wants all their email communications in all the right Salesforce.com records at their fingertips. No one wants to jump back and forward between Outlook or Gmail or some other email service and Salesforce.com just to be sure they understand the emails that have been sent and received from a customer.
For this reason, automatic syncing and logging of emails to Salesforce.com is an essential productivity tool. With emails uploaded to Salesforce.com from Outlook, Entourage, MacMail, Gmail and services like Yahoo!, AOL and Rackspace, end-users can save up to 100 hours per year of manual, boring, tedious labor. Plus a solution that associates email to Salesforce.com fully automatically and in real time is the only way to build a 100% complete email record or archive in the CRM system.
But as much as users want the convenience and time-savings of automatic email sorting, binding, matching and uploading, they are equally concerned about privacy and confidentiality controls. Users of email syncing tools worry about an email being seen by the wrong person and creating a corporate or client mishap or faux pas that might damage their social relationships, career or bonus.
In a perfect world, the email syncing tool would be able to read your mind and know intuitively which emails should be uploaded to Salesforce.com and which emails should be blocked or filtered. But unfortunately computers can’t read your mind. Therefore, a cloud application needs to give the end-user the tools to manage the email stream so that privacy and confidentiality are safeguarded.
Match My Email offers privacy and confidentiality controls at three levels:
1. Folder selection at the email server;
2. Privacy lists and permissions in the Match My Email cloud; and
3. Profiles and sharing within Salesforce.com.
To pick the right combination of privacy controls, it is best to work person-to-person via web conference with the Match My Email support desk at support ( a ) matchmyemail.com.
Folder Selection: The first line of privacy and confidential controls offered by Match My Email is folder selection. Match My Email enables each user to select the folders from his or her email system(s) to import into the Match My Email cloud and match with customer records in Salesforce.com. Folder selection lets the end-user pick, for example, the INBOX and SENT ITEMS folders from an email account but exclude all other Folders. Confidential, private or irrelevant emails can be segregate in the excluded Folders by using ‘Rules and Alerts’ in Outlook or ‘Filters’ in Gmail.
Privacy Lists and Permissions: Within the Match My Email, a second set of privacy controls are available. These include the Ignore command which blocks an email address from being processed. Once an email address is Ignored, an email containing that email address can never be logged into Salesforce. The Ignore command includes a number of options that let the end-user fine-tune his or her privacy settings. Ignore commands can be set up based on direction; Ignore if the email address is related to the sender or a recipient or both. It is possible to Ignore the entire email message or just one email in it.
Match My Email also lets the Account Owner assign privacy roles. If an user is designated an ‘end-user’ then he or she can only see his or her email stream – defined as email imported using his or her email username and password. Or an end-user can be made an ‘admin’. An admin can see the entire email stream of the ‘group’ that the Account Owner assigns them to.
Profiles and Sharing: The third set of privacy controls reside in Salesforce.com. Because the MultiMatch version of Match My Email requires a custom object, access to Email Messages can be limited to those users in Salesforce.com that have the ‘custom object’ within their Profile. As a default, Multimatch recommends that every sales rep and executive in Salesforce.com be given a new custom Profile that includes the Email Messages custom object. But the user and/or his or her organization has full control over who gets access to the Email log via the custom Profile. By giving certain ‘Users’ standard Profiles, they can be excluded from seeing the email stream.
In addition, Salesforce.com includes Sharing entitlements. A ‘User’ has control over who he or she shares his or her client records with inside of Salesforce.com — whether they are Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Accounts or Cases. Match My Email confronts with Salesforce.com sharing rules because each imported email is linked to a User. That means that only the User can see the uploaded email unless the User shares his or her ‘objects’ in Salesforce.com with another User. Sharing can be either in bulk – i.e., all Leads with all Users or another single User or on a case-by-case basis– just the Dell or Kimberley-Clark account. These Sharing commands were very helpful in segmenting and segregating information so that private or confidential email is only seen by the people who should have access to it.
Best Practice: As a Best Practice, Match My Email recommends that employees or contractors not be put into Salesforce.com as Contacts. Putting an employee or internal person in SFDC as a Contact is an end-run around Salesforce.com’s sharing rules and can cause private or confidential information to leak.
However, adding an employee as a Contact can be useful in certain situations. Some customers want lawyers to see all the email coming and going from sales reps to the customers. If the lawyers is cc:ed on such emails and the lawyer is set up as a Contact, then as a Profile user the lawyer would be able to see the email stream.
