Enable Unified Customer Identity
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe what a Salesforce solution kit is and why you’d use one.
- List the products needed to create a single identity for each customer across your ecommerce sites and your communities.
What’s a Solution Kit?
Salesforce provides solution kits to help you solve common business problems by connecting two clouds. You can find solution kits in our Salesforce Guides, which present a variety of resources to help your business integrate Salesforce clouds and deliver impactful, personalized shopping experiences for your customers.
Each solution kit addresses a real-world use case and provides a list of required products, considerations, connectors, and configuration steps. Solution kits also include a high-level workflow diagram to guide your process.
The goal of this module isn’t to walk you through implementing a solution step-by-step, but rather to show you what’s possible with solution kits. We also point you to the resources you need if you do want to implement a solution described here.
Meet Northern Trail Outfitters
Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) is an outerwear, apparel, and gear retailer for outdoor recreation and fitness.
NTO operates an ecommerce storefront, where shoppers browse and make purchases from an extensive catalog. It also hosts a vibrant online community, where customers register their purchases and exchange information with other outdoor enthusiasts about equipment, events, and the best spots to seek adventure.
Pia Larson, NTO’s enterprise architect, thinks that navigating between the storefront and the community should be easier than hiking from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other. She wants to establish a single identity that NTO customers can use to log in, whether they’re coming to NTO to buy gear or to ask the community a question. She also wants to be able to transfer customers from the community to the ecommerce site without making them authenticate with new credentials. Pia knows that a unified identity provides the best experience for NTO customers, who want to focus on getting outdoors, not logging in to websites.
The Solution: Seamless Cross-Cloud Identity
Pia works with Charlotte Liu, NTO’s solution architect, and Warren Mehta, NTO’s IT systems specialist, to start building a solution. They plan to store core profile information and authentication credentials for each customer in Experience Cloud. That way, other integrated environments can use this single source as the system of record, and NTO can stop spending so much time and money synchronizing and migrating customer profile data.
Pia notes that in this solution, NTO’s Salesforce B2C Commerce storefront continues to store shopping data—customer address books, payment information, wish lists, and so on—but references the customer profile data stored in Experience Cloud, such as name and email address.
The team also considers adding Salesforce External Identity Embedded Login to connect the NTO community with the storefront. They learn that a connected app handles communication between the login web page and the Salesforce back end, and they agree that Embedded Login helps them achieve their goal of a seamless experience for NTO customers.
What Products Does This Solution Require?
To implement this solution, NTO needs:
- Experience Cloud
- Salesforce Identity
- B2C Commerce
NTO also needs these licenses for their customers:
- Experience Cloud
- Salesforce Identity
Pia reviews the workflow diagram included in the solution kit to see how Experience Cloud, Salesforce Identity, and Salesforce B2C Commerce work together to create customer profiles and use them for authentication.
Pia notes that each cloud maintains a profile creation and modification workflow. She checks the solution kit and sees that this design helps ensure that relevant cross-cloud identifiers are included in every profile.
Set Up Experience Cloud and B2C Commerce for Cross-Cloud Identity
Now that the NTO architects have a finalized plan, they start working with community and storefront admins to set up Experience Cloud and Salesforce B2C Commerce to support cross-cloud identity. Since NTO already set up the Salesforce B2C Commerce to Service Cloud Connector, and the connector supports person accounts out of the box, the team uses person accounts instead of contact accounts to set up Experience Cloud users.
B2C Commerce admins configure Salesforce Identity as an OAuth2 provider, so that customers can log in with a single set of credentials to the community and the storefront. Although core customer profile data is stored in Experience Cloud, B2C Commerce also maintains a stub and shadow record to represent the customer. Profiles in each cloud include cross-cloud identifiers, which link them together.
To implement Embedded Login, the community admin and storefront web developer work together to create a login page with NTO branding and a connected app to handle user logins and maintain the connection between the community and storefront website.