How to automatically enroll your customers to your community?

Howdy ​@Cansu !

If memory serves, there is a way to do it via the API if you don’t mind having someone on your team write some code. Here’s the docs for it https://api2-eu-west-1.insided.com/docs/user/#tag/User/operation/register - but please make sure to use the EU or US version as appropriate, depending on where your instance is set up at.

Using the API, you should be able to register users in bulk to get things going, and then do one-shot registrations as needed. However, you’d need to know what usernames folks want because without that, this won’t work.

You should also consider whether being automatically signed up without an explicit user action is what your customers would want - this may be undesirable in some situations.

Alternatively, you could look at using Single Sign-On that automatically creates a forum account the first time a user attempts to sign in - they’ll still get to choose their own username of course - but doesn’t bulk register tons of users who might not want to sign up. Not quite as slick as immediately creating the forum account when a new customer starts using your products, but does make it a one-click solution at least!

I noticed you’re already set up for SSO, so I’m just curious as to your idea to automate it further?

I’ll just jump in to recommend checking with your legal department before enrolling people automatically into a community, as creating an account for someone without their consent could be borderline in regard to data protection laws. 

Thank you ​@Blastoise186 for the reply! It’s an ask that came from our CSMs and CCO to explore. We are of course aware of the legal implications but I’d like to also explore the technicalities. 

We do have SSO yet the ask is specifically directly registering them while I’m aware this isn’t common practice 

Hey ​@alizee yes as I mentioned we are aware of it and doing our investigation on how we can incorporate t&c’s and opt-ins in earlier stages of agreements. Thanks for chipping in.

I am curious - are there any organizations that auto-enroll their customers following a certain criteria or action?  Also if you are using this capability, what is the outcome from your legal team? 

Gotcha. So yeah, if I park the legal stuff for now (I’ll be honest - it’s way beyond my knowledge anyway!) and focus purely on the technical side, I’d say the API will probably work and you can then just have the users login via SSO. However, they’d lose access to the first-time setup wizard - such as the ability to set their username - and since users can’t change that themselves later, you’d need to come up with a way to set them as part of account creation. Or if you wanted to, you could also use the API to do that later via your own tooling.

So in theory, you could probably build something that uses the API to automatically create Forum/Community accounts initially, and then allow users to change their usernames (one-time only?) to something of their choice. Or you could have it as part of general sign-up that you have your customers set up an initial username/password and then use that to provision a forum account via the API. And then they can just use SSO after that anyway.

As for all the existing customers? Personally, I get the feeling that the easiest solution might just be to let them sign themselves up via your SSO integration.

Likewise, if you wish, you can also use the API to delete a user if you wanted to automatically remove their forum account as part of any wider offboarding.

The one thing I’m not sure about (and what makes me the most nervous!) is what Gainsight would think of this. Let me see if ​@Kenneth R is around as he would probably know about that than I ever could.

Yep we definitely have had some customers who auto-enrolled folks into their communities via API.  It’s not a common use case but it has been done.  As mentioned in the thread already, you’d need to ensure that the T&Cs are covered somewhere earlier in the process, and you’d have to set the username for each member.  It’s uncommon but can be done.  :)