Introduction to communication intelligence

One of Attio’s most powerful features is its communication intelligence. By syncing your inbox and calendar, Attio automatically catalogs every interaction you’ve had with your customers, and provides real-time insights about your customer relationships that you can use to make better business decisions.

You can access this intelligence through built-in attributes. These attributes are:

Communication intelligence in action

For example, on the Companies page, we can immediately see the Last calendar interaction and First email interaction of all of our records in real-time. These attributes are “smart attributes” – meaning they’re automatically enriched by Attio and are highlighted in purple, with a sparkle at the top of the column.

If we click + to add another column, we can see the full list of the out-of-the-box attributes Attio provides for communication intelligence. Learn more about all of Attio's enriched attributes here.

It’s worth noting that these insights become even more valuable when more team members connect their inboxes, as Attio combines all communication your whole team has had with that record.

This means you can see when your team’s first calendar interaction was with a record, who it was that had that meeting, or the when the last email interaction was, and who that correspondence was with.

Connection strength

Attio also automatically calculates your Connection strength with a particular company or person by weighting the recency and frequency of the communication. So if you sent 10 emails back and forth with a person one year ago, that connection strength will be weaker than with someone you emailed back and forth 10 times in the last month.

Viewing events

You can easily see all emails and calendar events associated with a particular record by navigating to that record’s page.

For example, if we open the Deel record we can instantly see that there’s a meeting logged on the Activity feed. These are logged for any team member who has synced their email and calendar.

If you click into the calendar event, you can see both who attended the event, and what every individual’s response was to the invitation.

Viewing emails

Emails are located in the Emails tab. You’ll see that we have full access to some emails, whereas others we have to request access to. These different views are a result of the email permissions system in Attio, which you can control from your Account settings. Learn more about configuring email sharing settings.

Manage your connected accounts

You can manage your connected accounts in Account settings > Email & Calendar. Here you can see which email account you have connected to a workspace, and set access permissions for your emails.

If you click … you can edit your connection, reconnect the mailbox, or remove it altogether. This makes it easy to reconfigure your inbox connection after running the initial sync.

If you’re on the Pro plan or above, you’ll also have the option to connect multiple email accounts to Attio.

Permission settings

You can also control the specific permission settings for each email account you have connected to your Attio workspace.

By default, Attio restricts email permissions to 'Metadata Only.' However, you can adjust this to include 'Subject Line and Metadata,' or grant 'Full Access' to everyone in your workspace.

You also have the option to share full access to your emails with particular team members. For example, your sales team may want to grant each other full access to each other’s emails so it’s easy to catch up on communication with customers. Learn more about configuring email sharing settings.

Additionally, you can control email access on a record-by-record level, by clicking Manage access in the top right corner of a record page. You can then choose to share these emails with the entire workspace, or with particular team members. Learn more about sharing emails.

Blocklist settings

Returning to Account settings, you can also designate a blocklist for a particular mailbox. Any communication from domains or email addresses in the blocklist will not appear in Attio.

Blocklists are particularly useful if you have sensitive communication that you do not want to be shared in Attio. They are configured on a mailbox-by-mailbox level, so each team member has control over their own blocklist. Learn more about blocklisting emails and domains.

Enhanced record creation

In Attio, you can also control whether records are created for every email and calendar invite received, or only when you have sent an email to that domain. This is useful for preventing a contact from being created when you receive an email from a newsletter, or even spam.

By default, enhanced record creation is enabled for all users. Admins can easily toggle it off in Workspace settings > Email & calendar. However, this is a workspace-wide setting, so will affect all team members who have their inboxes connected. Learn more about automatic record creation.

Up next

Learn about how notes work in Attio.