Access to your contacts anywhere and anytime with Lightning Sync

Some time ago Google and Salesforce announced an intensive partnership to improve the integration between the Salesforce platform and Google G Suite. Two great examples of that are Lightning for Gmail and Lightning Sync. While there has always been a free plugin for Microsoft Outlook, our clients had to rely on paid 3rd party apps for Gmail integration. Fortunately Salesforce has now closed this gap. Today more about Lightning Sync.

Synchronise Salesforce and GMail

Lightning Sync enables users to synchronise contacts and/or calendar items between Salesforce and Gmail. Configuring this integration is not time consuming; you simply need to follow the steps in the Salesforce guidelines. However, you do need administration rights on both Salesforce and G Suite to perform any synchronisation actions.

You can determine fairly extensively what you want to sync in the Lightning Sync Configuration: contacts and/or calendar events and also in which direction you want to synchronise them. You can also use filters. For example, to filter in only those contacts that the user is also the owner of, or to include only contacts with an address in the Netherlands. We normally also opt to filter inactive contacts out.

Hidden gem

An option that should not be missed is the use of the checkbox “Sync contacts users follow in Chatter”. In our experience, this is a hidden gem. You would normally not want to synchronise all contacts out of Salesforce into your Gmail. But only your own contacts is also too limited. This checkbox solves that particular dilemma. A user can follow contacts on Chatter to get them in Gmail contacts by choosing this option together with “User’s Records”.

Having your most important Salesforce contacts in Gmail makes it easier to email them of course. An additional advantage is that they will also be added to your telephone contact list. On receiving a call you can thus immediately see who the caller is, and also from which company. This would not be the case by just using the Salesforce app on your phone.

Only for Android? No way!

In our analysis it was discovered that contacts where only synced to Android phones and not to iPhones. Contacts synced to iPhones appeared to be stored in “My Contacts” and the Lightning Sync stores them under the label “Salesforce Sync”.

The preferred solution – to encourage all employees to switch their iPhones for Android telephones – wasn’t deemed to be too acceptable to everyone 😉 Fortunately we have excellent Google knowledge and skills within our organization to come up with a sensible solution: we wrote a script to run within the G Suite environment for selected users. For the contacts that fall under the “Salesforce Sync” label the script also assigns them the “My Contacts” label. Now all our customer’s employees – including iPhone users – can see the names and company of the leads or contacts calling them.

Would you like to learn more about Lightning Sync or Lightning for Gmail? Do not hesitate to contact Senior Salesforce Consultant Tim Slijp at tim@g.company or +31 6 29 32 34 41.