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The Salesforce integration matches users to contacts / community member objects based on email address. 

I have a common use case for updating user profiles with new email addresses after they have switched companies. Often they have created a duplicate user profile with their new email and they reach out asking if they can update their old one, so that all their points, badges, status, etc are tied to their new email. 

Here’s what it looks like with the Salesforce integration

  • User A
    • Email A (original email address)
    • Salesforce record A is matched based on email A
  • User B
    • Email B (new email address)
    • Salesforce record B is matched based on email B

Here’s my question: When I update the emails to switch which user they belong to, does the Salesforce integration still write to the same record, or does it re-match to the the record with the correct email? 

  • Updated User A
    • Email B (new email address)
    • Salesforce record ??? is matched and gets the new activity written to it
  • Updated User B
    • Email A (old email address)
    • Salesforce record ??? is matched and gets the new activity written to it
      • Except there won’t be new activity and I can delete/archive this user

I got an answer from Support. 

We tested this and got a confirmation that,If you change the email address of a user, the activity is still logged to the old account until the next contact sync runs.
 
Then after the contact sync runs, it relinks the account via the new email address to the new SF contact with the same email address and then if the email matches  from then any new activity is pushed to the new SF contact.(But the previous activity data will not be synced.)

 

Per this article, contact syncs for the Salesforce integration run every 6 hours. So there’s a period of 6 hours (or less if the sync happens soon) that the data will sync to the original contact record. After that, it’ll match to the new one and write going forward. 

Using my example above, this is what happens:

  • Updated User A
    • Email B (new email address)
    • Salesforce record B is matched and gets the new activity written to it
  • Updated User B
    • Email A (old email address)
    • Salesforce record A matched and gets the new activity written to it
      • Except there won’t be new activity and I can delete/archive this user

What this means for Community Managers: 

  1. If a user has a new email and you want that user’s activity to be kept together on one Salesforce record, then you need to also update the email on the Salesforce record. Otherwise it’ll write to a new salesforce record breaking their activity into two parts: old email and new email. 
     
  2. If you update an email of a user in Control, you also need to update the email of the Salesforce record. Otherwise the emails won’t match and the next contact sync (within 6 hours) will cause the integration to either stop writing the activity for that user all together or #1 above (write the activity to a new record).  

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