Salesforce

How to Import Salesforce Account data to CC

  • 23 November 2020
  • 26 replies
  • 1320 views

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  With our Salesforce Account import integration, you can bring Account data into CC and link it to community members.  You can then get insights about account-level engagement on the engagement dashboard.

This article explains how to configure the integration that pulls Salesforce Account data into CC

To set this integration up, you’ll need to find out which field on the Account object in your Salesforce instance identifies whether an Account is a customer.

Salesforce admins can implement this in several different ways, so make sure you find out the correct field to use. Currently, we only support Salesforce fields with the type ‘picklist’ on the Account object.

How to set up the Salesforce Account Import

 

Firstly, make sure you’ve installed the Salesforce app on CC:

https://community.insided.com/integrations-124/how-to-install-the-salesforce-x-insided-integrations-3932

  1. Go to Control > Integrations > Apps > Salesforce
  2. Under the integration ‘Import Salesforce Account data to CC’, select the Account field which identifies whether an Account is a customer.
  3. Then select the value (or values) that represents a customer.
  4. Make sure the ‘Automatically import Salesforce accounts to CC’ toggle is turned on.
  5. Press save changes, and you’re done!

What happens next?

  • We’ll start importing Salesforce Accounts to your CC instance and matching them with community members.
  • The Salesforce Account import currently runs on a schedule every 6 hours to import Account data and process any Accounts that have been added, updated, or removed.

 

 

How do we match community members to Accounts?

We match community members to Accounts based on a matching Contact (based on email address) with a relationship to that Account. (The same linking process is used as with the Salesforce community data export).

 

🛑 Limitations of the Salesforce Account import integration

  • Salesforce Parent Accounts are not supported: this integration only looks at ‘child’ Accounts.
  • Community members can only be linked to a single Account: at the moment, we only link the community member to one Account, even if the Contact is related to multiple Accounts.
  • Accounts with a name exceeding 128 characters are not imported: currently we pass over Accounts that exceed this restriction when importing from Salesforce.
  • Salesforce ‘Person Accounts’ are not supported. This integration is aimed at B2B companies using the standard Account object in Salesforce.
  • Currently we only support the AccountField in the Import Salesforce Account data to inSided which accepts multiple values.

26 replies

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I’m not seeing any of the fields mentioned in the settings for the SF integration. Has this process changed? I’m looking to activate the engagement dashboard in our sandbox.

@daniel.boon we’re using a formula field for this. For example, in our case if they are a paying customer we display a vaiue of “1.0 Customer”. Is the use of a formula field an option here?

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I’m not seeing any of the fields mentioned in the settings for the SF integration. Has this process changed? I’m looking to activate the engagement dashboard in our sandbox.

Thanks for your question and great that you’re interested in this @adam.ballhaussen → this feature is still in (private) beta at the moment. I’ve enabled it for you on both staging and production

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@daniel.boon we’re using a formula field for this. For example, in our case if they are a paying customer we display a vaiue of “1.0 Customer”. Is the use of a formula field an option here?

Great question @Scott Baldwin - not right now, but as mentioned in the article we’re certainly open to increasing the flexibility of the mapping, so I’ve taken note of your feedback.

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Excellent, thank you @daniel.boon! I configured the integration in sandbox. How long does the sync take to initiate? I just activated it and don’t see any Company info in sandbox at the moment. I assume it would take some time to sync but do not see a “sync progress” indicator. I appreciate any info you can provide! I’m excited to use this feature.

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Glad to hear it @adam.ballhaussen! Right now the integration imports data every 24 hours on a schedule (so I expect that you’ll now have some data imported) It doesn’t import directly on setup, but that’s something we’d like to add for the public release 🙂.

Which Salesforce contact fields are imported into Insided? Is the import just confirming the user exists in our Salesforce instance or is it importing additional data?

@davetee Here’s what our Product experts shared: We import Contact Id, Account Id and Email from Contact. If the company import is enabled, we import Id, Name and Status from Account as well. Hope this helps! 

Are there a certain number of Salesforce API calls we can expect this integration to use? 

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Hi @logicalhare it will depend greatly on the number of contacts in salesforce, amount of activity in your community and other factors. Unfortunately we are not able to provide an estimate of the amount of API calls.

Thanks @bas

 

I certainly understand how it will be hard to get a good estimate. I’m hoping to provide a clearer picture to my Salesforce admin because they are concerned about the SFDC rate limit. I have a follow-up analysis that I would appreciate some help with, if possible.

 

We will use the Export and Import integrations. The documentation states that each of them runs every 6 hours to process accounts. Furthermore, the Export integration runs every 10 minutes to process community member activity.

  • This totals 152 “runs” per day. Are there scenarios that would result in more than the 152 runs?

We have 665,191 contacts and 157,677 accounts in SFDC. 

  • How do the syncs work, especially the first time these integrations run? Are these batch operations, or are operations carried out for each individual account? 
  • Are there any settings on the inSided side for managing SFDC API calls / frequency? Have the integrations been designed to respect any rate limits?

I appreciate the assistance and expertise!

 

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Hi @logicalhare , please not that while I was on holiday @arminfpop took over and is routing this to our engineering team. A bit more patience please, we’ll get back to you :) 

I don’t see the option to test this integration in sandbox. Is that the case? I only see the option to export community data to Salesforce, not import data from Salesforce to the community.

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@logicalhare Hey Javier! I’ve updated your configs in your staging environment so you should now be able to see the option to import data from Salesforce to the Community 🙂

Thanks Joyce!

@logicalhare I’d love to hear how you go with understanding how the syncs work and how efficient they are/aren’t. 

We couldn’t find an answer to this other than it looks like everything is synced with each run…

We’re looking into an API solution where we can control the rates, what is synced etc.

If you discover that the the Salesforce integration is actually reasonably efficient then this would give us the chance to change our approach and save quite a bit of time :) 


 

@BenSmokeBall We’ve been testing in the staging environment but haven’t got a bunch of representative data yet. Hoping to meet with inSided this week to ask some follow up questions. Will keep you posted!

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Hi @logicalhare @BenSmokeBall 

We received some rough numbers back from engineering. As you will understand, it is all quite dependent on the size of the community and the activities.

For import we query all the contacts and accounts (optionally) every 12 hrs. Each response could carry up to 2000 items, so we have to make <number_of_contacts>/2000 number of calls, the same for accounts.
For export we make a call per activity of a community user linked to a contact, so it depends purely on community activities.

 

And regarding the first run:

It is the same every 12 hours: all contacts with emails set are queried in batches of 2000 and (if company integration enabled) accounts are queried in batches of 2000.
We start pushing activities since the moment integration is enabled, so no burst of API calls is expected.

 

We do not offer configuration of these settings and the integration has not been optimized/designed to limit requests.

 

Regarding building your own API-based integration, I would advise you to await the new data / BI-tooling initiative:

 

Hope this helps!

Thank you @bas 

Quick follow-up:

  • What is the optional part of the import? I don’t see anything that indicates an optional configuration in the setup to select contacts versus accounts.

    For import we query all the contacts and accounts (optionally) every 12 hrs”

    It is the same every 12 hours: all contacts with emails set are queried in batches of 2000 and (if company integration enabled) accounts are queried in batches of 2000.
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Ah yes sorry, I should’ve been clearer.

The salesforce integration has several parts, the “import Salesforce Account data to inSided” can be turned off, then it won’t sync/query accounts.

 

@bas tried to see what I am getting on our account as well, for some reason its recognizing most accounts active on the community as inactive on salesforce what is the determining field this is looking at? as this is far from the reality… 

 

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@Maayan K I suggest you reach out to support for these sort of questions; they will be able to take a look at the logs and see if anything untoward is happening.

@adam.ballhaussen @Scott Baldwin @Maayan K @logicalhare or would anyone else on this thread be willing to speak live for 15-20 minutes to share how you’re setting up dashboards and using Salesforce to measure growth in active users? I know it will go a long way to help us measure our successes if you have some time! 🙏

We’re moving off inSided shortly, so I’m probably not the best, maybe @DannyPancratz can help?

Our community is limited to developers at the moment, most of which are not our customers. So we’re taking a slow approach to using the Salesforce data. For now, all we utilize are the default custom objects provided by the integration, not the dashboards. Our CSMs can pull reports based on those objects that tell them how their accounts are interacting on the community (number of questions posted, replies, likes, etc.). Our data is pretty limited though as mentioned, so not much to share yet.

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