Throughout any given workday, Backstory ingests business activities such as emails, calendar meetings, and phone calls for analytical use in the web application, API, and, if eligible, syncs to Salesforce.

There are times, however, when an email, meeting, or call may not be found in Backstory as expected. Below are the most common reasons that this may happen. With the help of your Backstory administrator and by following best practices, you can ensure that your activities are correctly ingested and made available for analytics.

Be sure to keep an eye on the Backstory status page as well while troubleshooting.

In Backstory, if an activity is unable to match to an Account, Opportunity, or Lead, it will be shown as ‘External - No Match’, like so:

An activity may fail to match as expected for a variety of reasons. For more information, read this article.

If the activity you’re looking for isn’t visible on the Account or Opportunity you’re expecting it to be, try navigating to the Activity Feed page and filtering for the date and time the activity took place.

From there, you can manually append the unmatched activity to the desired Salesforce object using Edit Match.

The Backstory web application includes a feature called Local Filters, which enables administrators to add patterns that will block Backstory from ingesting sensitive or non-business-relevant activities.

The most common reason an email or meeting is missing from Backstory is that a part of the missing activity matched a Local Filter. Most of the time, Local Filters are designed to prevent the ingestion of non-human emails or emails from non-business-relevant domains.

If an overly broad pattern is added as an ingestion Local Filter, however, it can prevent legitimate activities from being detected. For example, *@uber.com would certainly prevent automated emails from Uber from being ingested, but it could also block business emails.

If an email or meeting is missing from the Backstory application, check the Local Filters page for any patterns that might be responsible and determine if the Local Filter can be removed or adjusted to be more specific.

By default, Backstory will not ingest activities involving personal domains, such as gmail.com, yahoo.com, msn.com, etc. For more information, please refer to this article.

For most Backstory users, activities involving personal domains are not business-relevant. They are often calendar placeholders for a spouse, forwarded to personal non-work emails, or any other variety of activities that are not relevant for analytics purposes.

This behavior is configurable, however. For users in business development roles, activities involving personal domains can be considered legitimate prospecting activities. With that, Backstory can be configured to allow analytics on activities involving personal domains upon request.

This behavior can be controlled at the Configuration Profile-level, meaning personal domain activities will not be dropped for users assigned to whitelisted Configuration Profiles.

In summary, if the activity you’re not able to find in Backstory involves at least one personal domain, it was likely dropped for privacy reasons.

On average, Backstory pulls net-new activities into the web application for analysis every 15 minutes. This can vary, however, depending on the size of your organization, specifically if the pull interval has been modified to occur less frequently.

Please allow up to two hours for new activities to be pulled into Backstory.

Calls are slightly different from emails and meetings in that they’re pulled from CRM, rather than users’ mailboxes and calendars. For this reason, they’re handled differently by Backstory in terms of how often they’re pulled into the web application.

The information (metadata) available for calls is often less robust. Specifically, the Due Date field, which is used to determine when the call took place, is a date field and not a DateTime field.

This means Backstory is unable to determine the exact time the call actually took place. As a result of this data limitation, the date and time in Backstory will default to 12 am UTC of the Due Date.

Depending on where you are in the world, this will display your organization’s calls as having taken place at the same time on the day they took place, like so:

Every dialer has its nuances; however, this behavior has consistently yielded the most reliable results.

For a call to be successfully pulled into Backstory, it must meet at least one of the following two requirements.

If the call in question does not meet either of the above requirements, it will not be considered a valid call and will only be available in Salesforce. For more information, please refer to this article.

If a calendar meeting is canceled, it will no longer be visible in Backstory.

Meetings involving only one (internal) participant are not considered for ingestion and, therefore, will not be visible in the Backstory web application. Common examples of single-participant meetings include placeholders, travel time, reminders, and doctors' appointments. These types of meetings are not business-relevant and can inflate time spent metrics. Therefore, they’re excluded by default.

Please ensure your meetings have at least one external participant.

By default, activities created by or owned by suspended users in Backstory are not visible.

Suspended users can be viewed by administrators on the Users & Teams page. Please check with your Backstory administrator to ensure no users are unnecessarily suspended in Backstory.

This behavior can be modified upon request. Please contact your Backstory point of contact for more information.

For privacy reasons, Backstory will not display emails where the only Backstory user is found in the BCC field.

If a Backstory user is included in the To, From, or CC field, the email will be displayed accordingly in Backstory.

In other words, Backstory will not display an email’s BCC participants. If the only Backstory user is in BCC, the activity will not be displayed.