Automatic Contact Creation detects new contacts from your team's emails and meetings and creates them directly in Salesforce. When Backstory identifies an external contact that doesn't already exist in your CRM and has enough information to create a record, it pushes that contact to Salesforce automatically. Over time, Backstory continues to enrich those records as contact details like title, phone number, or email address change.
What This Article Covers
How Backstory automatically creates contacts in Salesforce
How Backstory automatically creates Opportunity Contact Roles in Salesforce
How Backstory can keep existing contact records updated with Contact Enrichment
How to view automatically created contacts by running a Salesforce report
Frequently asked questions
Contact Creation
Prerequisites: Your administrator must enable Contact Creation for the relevant Configuration Profile. Your administrator can also customize the required fields needed to create a contact.
Using your activity data, Backstory automatically creates new Salesforce contact records when:
The contact or a matching lead record does not already exist in Salesforce.
The activity includes the contact's first name, last name, and email address.
The contact's email domain matches an existing account's primary or secondary domain.
The user on the activity is the account owner, opportunity owner, or an account team member in Salesforce.
Note: If a lead with a matching email address is found, the activity is matched to the lead and no contact is created.
When creating a contact, Backstory populates the following Salesforce fields with the available information:
First Name, Last Name, Email
Title, Phone
Department, Seniority, Persona (Backstory custom fields)
Mailing Address (Country, State)
Owner, Lead Source
New contacts are owned by the user whose activity triggered the creation. If that person isn't a Salesforce user, ownership defaults to the integration user.
New contacts sync to Salesforce at the same time as activities. It can take up to 2 hours for a new contact to appear after an activity is captured. Avoid manually creating contacts during this window to prevent duplicates.
Note: Contact creation is independent of activity sync. Backstory can create contacts from emails and meetings even if your organization does not sync all activity types to Salesforce.
Opportunity Contact Role Creation
Backstory administrators can enable Contact Role Creation (OCR) in Configuration Profiles. Once enabled, Backstory will create Opportunity Contact Roles in Salesforce from emails and meetings and append them to the appropriate open Opportunities.
Note: For automatic Opportunity Contact Role creation to work, the Opportunity must have at least one manually created Opportunity Contact Role, or your organization can choose to enable First OCR instead (see below).
When you send an email or schedule a meeting with external participants, Backstory evaluates the activity and creates OCRs based on the following logic.
Backstory creates an OCR when all of the following are true:
At least one participant exists as a contact on an account and also exists as a Contact Role on an open Opportunity associated with that Account.
The other participants do not already exist as Contact Roles on that Opportunity.
The participants' email domains match the Account's domain.
If the other participants exist as contacts on the Account, Backstory will create Contact Roles for them. If they do not exist as contacts on the Account, Backstory will first create contacts on the Account and then create Contact Roles on the open Opportunity.
Backstory will not add participants as Contact Roles on a closed Opportunity, and will not add participants to the same Opportunity as Contact Roles if their domains do not match.
First OCR
First OCR allows Backstory to create the very first Opportunity Contact Role on an Opportunity, even when none exist yet. This is useful for getting new Opportunities into a trackable state faster, without waiting for a contact role to be added manually.
Note: First OCR can only create a Contact Role when there is exactly one possible Opportunity match for the activity. If multiple Opportunities could match, Backstory will not create a First OCR.
New OCR
New OCR allows Backstory to create additional contact roles on an Opportunity regardless of whether an existing OCR is involved in the activity. This is especially useful for sales teams that regularly communicate with multiple stakeholders across a deal, or in situations where a primary contact becomes unresponsive and new contacts need to be tracked.
Multi-Opportunity Matching
When Multi-Opportunity Matching is enabled for your organization, Backstory will create OCRs across all matched Opportunities when an activity matches more than one. This is common on accounts with several active deals running at the same time.
Contact Enrichment
By default, Backstory does not update the standard fields of contact records that were created manually in your CRM. With Contact Enrichment enabled, Backstory can keep those existing contact records evergreen by automatically refreshing field values as new information is observed in your team's activity data.
Prerequisites: Your administrator must work with Backstory to enable Contact Enrichment and configure which fields are eligible for updates. Contact your Customer Success Manager or email support@backstory.ai.
Once enabled, your administrator can choose how each eligible field is treated:
Always update: Backstory overwrites the existing value whenever new information for the field is observed.
Update only if empty: Backstory writes a value only when the field is currently blank. If a value already exists, the field is left unchanged.
Never update: Backstory ignores the field and never modifies it.
Field-level rules give you control over how aggressively records are refreshed. For example, you might choose to always update Title and Phone as people change roles, but only populate Department when it's blank to preserve manual overrides.
Note: Contact Owner is not updated by Contact Enrichment. Ownership of existing contacts is preserved regardless of activity data.
The Persona, Department, and Seniority fields can also be controlled by separate enrichment settings in Backstory. If either Contact Enrichment or those separate settings is configured to update one of these fields, Backstory will update it.
View Contacts Created by Backstory
Prerequisites: You must have permission to create reports in Salesforce.
In Salesforce, navigate to Reports.
Click New Report.
Click the Contacts & Accounts report type.
Click Start Report.
Click the Filters tab.
In the Add filter field, search “Created by Backstory” and click the field to add it.
In the Created By Backstory dropdown, select True.
Click Apply.
Click Run.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take for a new contact to appear in Salesforce?
It can take up to 2 hours for a new contact to appear in Salesforce after the triggering activity is captured.
What happens if a contact is missing a first name, last name, or email?
Backstory will not create the contact. These three fields are the minimum required to create a record. Your administrator can configure additional required fields.
Who is assigned as the contact owner?
The contact is owned by the user whose activity triggered its creation. If that person doesn't have a Salesforce user account, ownership defaults to the integration user.
What happens if a Lead already exists for the external participant?
If a Lead with an exact email match is found in Salesforce, Backstory will match the activity to that Lead instead of creating a new contact. Contact creation only occurs when neither a contact nor a Lead exists for the participant.
What if a contact was synced to Salesforce that shouldn't have been?
You can use the Engagement Log to remove it. Keeping your Local Filters up-to-date can also help prevent unwanted contacts from syncing in the future.
How does Backstory prevent the creation of duplicate contacts in Salesforce?
Backstory automatically removes duplicate contacts via an automated daily de-duplication process. Only contacts created by Backstory are eligible for deletion. When duplicates are found, Backstory deletes the extra records and remaps their activities to the earliest valid contact.
Does contact creation require activity sync to be enabled?
No. Contact creation is independent of activity sync. Backstory can create contacts from emails and meetings even if not all activity types are synced to Salesforce.
Can Backstory update contact information after the record is created?
Yes. Backstory continues to enrich contacts it has created over time as details like title, phone number, email address, or last name change.
Need Help?
Contact your Customer Success Manager or email support@backstory.ai.