Yikes. I’ll keep thinking on this, but not sure there’s a good answer.
TBH, I address this by manually updating SFDC community records and contacts once per week for 5-15 minutes. But my problem is much smaller in scope, as most match up thanks to SSO.
It’s worth it for me to take the time, as it’s key to allowing accurate segmentation for my reports and dashboards on engagement by account type, company, etc.
Here’s what I do:
SFDC Report of recently active community members (community activity, sorted reverse chronological by date), filtered for those whose account is blank (I think it uses account = “”).
Then, every Friday morning, I go through and I match those community user records and contacts up to the appropriate account.
warning: the integration matches on email address. So while it might make sense to match the community user record to an existing contact in salesforce tied to their work email, this will break the match with their Insided account. Updating the contact associated with a community user automatically writes the email from that contact record to the community user record.
We have done some user look up stuff with Zapier. Maybe you could use a profile field for company (if you have it) to try to find the account record and then update the contact or community record?
sounds like something that could be possible, but I haven’t done much with Salesforce and Zapier.
Last idea (sorry for the spam posting as my brain works through options).
IF you have to do a big manual audit. I’ve had success using the Google Sheets Zapier integration for running bulk actions. There’s an option for transferring all the existing data in the sheet and then running the actions setup. So you can get your sheet ready with updates, then run the Zap “once” in a way where it executes the Zap for every row in the sheet and does your bulk update.
From personal experience, this sounds like a situation where user identity matching becomes tricky without SSO in place, but there are a few approaches you could try:
- Duplicate Email Matching Rules: You can set up custom email matching rules within Salesforce that account for common scenarios where community members use a personal email. This might involve creating a workflow that cross-references known customer data (such as names or partial email matches) and flags potential account links manually.
- Zapier: Zapier could help automate this to some degree by linking community platform data with Salesforce based on other identifiers like phone numbers, social media profiles, or even usernames.
- Community Custom Fields: If you can get community members to add a secondary email field or other identifiers on sign-up, you could map those fields to Salesforce accounts for easier tracking.
- Manual Mapping: If none of these automated approaches works, consider periodically exporting community member data and running a VLOOKUP or similar to manually map users back to accounts, then bulk uploading updates.
Skipping SSO is tough, but there are ways to get creative with data and automation!
