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Need to Improve Username Quality

  • 2 July 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 53 views

Hi Community :-)

I work for a SaaS company and our customer community authenticates against our product, so customers get an SSO experience and only our customers and employees can access the community.

When a customer visits the community for the first time, they are prompted to enter a Username. Like this

My challenge is, b/c this is the first experience many customers have with our community, this prompt can seem like a hassle, so they enter something like “123abc” just to clear the prompt and later, as they become more active in the community, they regret the throw away user name which can only be changed by a community admin. 

So a few questions:

  1. How do a modify the text that displays on this account creation prompt screen?
  2. Has anyone else encountered this? What did you do? 

Thanks y’all :-) 

3 replies

security_lion
Userlevel 3

Hi @Rhonda , sharing some of what we do which has helped to reduce instances of what you described. As of today I’ve never had a community member request to change their username :) 

  1. We updated the text that shows up in the text box to suggest the new user uses their First Name and Last name for their username.
  2. We’re clear about which fields are visible on their profile.
  3. We have Username Restrictions (Control > Settings > Registration Rules)
  4. As part of our moderation playbook, we review all new users and have templates ready should we need to communicate a profile change to the user.

One out of the box suggestion - you could work with a developer to customize the Sidebar Widget code to display “help text” that only appears in this specific page. We haven’t done it ourselves, otherwise I would share the code with you. Highly recommend you test on your sandbox first.

 

Here are Gainsight community posts that will guide you on how to implement the above suggestions:

 

Rhonda
Userlevel 1

thanks so much @security_lion! I’ll get to work on this. 

why are there signatures at the end of every post?
DannyPancratz
Userlevel 6
Badge +7

@Rhonda in addition to security_lion’s more robust suggestions, here’s something simple I do related to #4 above: 

I have a slack automation for every new user that signs up. We don’t have admin approval for new users, so this is my “sunlight is the best disinfectant” approach. 

As users sign up, I see their username in slack. If anything problematic shows up (or if you want to work with them on improving it), you see it in real time and can address it immediately. I find this is easier and more effective than remembering to review, audit, and address new users on a weekly/monthly basis. 

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