Connect to Individual Customers
Learning Objectives
After completing this module, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the two types of Salesforce accounts.
- Understand how Salesforce Identity can benefit a business.
- List the steps to take to create a person account.
- Configure self-registration for person accounts.
From B2B to B2C with Person Accounts
You’ve set up Salesforce to work with businesses, from bars with holographic windows to trading centers on planet Penelope. But many space settlers, by nature, are independent. So how do you reach individual customers? How do you set up Salesforce Customer Identity in a business-to-consumer (B2C) model?
So far in this demo, we’ve used a traditional business account, where all contacts are placed under an account record. Typically, an account record contains information such as company name, location, website, and contacts. When dealing with individual consumers, you keep track of different information, so you need another type of account, called a person account.
After person accounts are enabled, you can’t turn them off. So before you set them up in your production org, make sure to test your person account implementation in a trial, development, or sandbox environment first.
Prepare Your Org for Person Accounts
Before enabling person accounts, you create a record type for business accounts. You don’t have to create a person account because Salesforce creates the person record type when it enables person accounts. Confusing? Yes.
- From Setup, click Object Manager.
- Select the Account object, then select Record Types.
- Click New.
- For Record Type Label, enter Business Account.
- Click Next.
- For page layout, select Account Layout as the layout to apply to all profiles.
- Click Save.
Verify your sharing settings.
- From Setup, enter Sharing in the Quick Find box, then select Sharing Settings.
- Make sure that Contact is set to Controlled by Parent.
Enable Person Accounts
- From Setup, enter Person Accounts in the Quick Find box, and then select Person Accounts.
- Go through the steps listed on the Setup page.
- Click Enable Person Accounts.
Configure Self-Registration for Person Accounts
To enable B2C customers access to your Salesforce Customer Identity site, you enable person accounts for your org.
Update your site’s public access settings to include both business and person record types.
- From Setup, enter Sites in the Quick Find box, then select All Sites and click Workspaces next to the Customers site.
- Select Administration, then Pages, then select Go to Force.com.
- Click Public Access Settings.
- Under Record Type Settings, click Edit next to Accounts.
- Select business and person record types and add them to Selected Record Types.
- Click Save.
Update the self-registration setting on your login configuration page.
- From Setup, enter Sites in the Quick Find box, then select All Sites and click Workspaces next to the Customers site.
- Select Administration, and then select Login & Registration.
- Scroll down to Registration and make sure that the default Account is empty. By removing the default, new users are created as person accounts.
- Click Save.
You’re done. New users who register with your branded self-registration are treated as B2C customers. Now your independent cosmic outliers can join your Salesforce Customer Identity site.
You can create person accounts programmatically using the registration handler. But that requires you to know Apex (or have a buddy who does).
What Happens When an Individual Self-Registers to Join Your Site?
When an individual customer self-registers to join a site, Salesforce does a couple of things behind the scenes.
- Salesforce creates a person account for the B2C customer.
- Salesforce creates a contact for the B2C customer.
- Salesforce creates a user for the B2C customer.
- Salesforce assigns the user the profile that you specified when you set up self-registration. In this case, the profile is Customers, cloned from the External Identity User profile.
Resources
- Salesforce Help: Person Accounts