The Salesforce connector for Vanilla is already powerful, allowing you to create new contacts, leads and cases in Salesforce from Vanilla community members & discussions. Today, we’re pleased to announce another big upgrade to the integration – Salesforce Activity Sync – which allows you to send data about how your customers are interacting in community to Salesforce, for further analysis and comparison alongside other data that lives in Salesforce. This exciting enhancement is available NOW! 

Community is central to a customer’s journey with a brand, and Salesforce is the source of truth for many organizations when it comes to understanding the health of key contacts and accounts. Adding community data with Salesforce data will help your CX team understand how customers are engaging with your product/service so you can have more meaningful conversations, and report on how community impacts the success of the account.  

Sync Vanilla Community Activity to Salesforce 

This integration allows for activity metrics of individual users to be sent to Salesforce; here's how it works: 

A handful of data points are aggregated within the Contact record: 

• When they were last active within the community 

• A feed of their most recent activity so you can see what they’ve been asking about/what they're interested in  

• A more detailed breakdown of their most recent community activity, e.g. ideas they’ve submitted/voted on, questions asked and answered, groups they’ve joined, events they are attending, and more  

Once that data is in the Contact record, CSMs, Support Agents, Sales Reps or even Marketing can understand how a contact has been engaging in community so they can personalize/target conversations, be aware of all their touchpoints and potentially identify community advocates.  

All this data is also channeled up into the Account record, to help make decisions and take action on the overall health and status of the Account. 

With all this core activity data now being pushed into Salesforce, you can leverage Salesforce dashboards and charts to help tell your community story in the broader context of your organization and strategy. 

A TRUE 360° View of Community Activity 

For organizations that want to achieve a true 360° view into their community activity, Vanilla can help. The Vanilla Salesforce integration already has the option to sync new community members to Salesforce, which other Salesforce/Community integrations cannot do out of the box.  

There are certainly members within your community that are not already a contact in Salesforce. If you want to get a full view of your community activity in Salesforce and use charts/dashboards to report on community impact, it’s important that you can create new contacts from Vanilla --> Salesforce. This way, you can send ALL community member activity to Salesforce and report on all the insights that matter most to your organization. 

Learn More & Get Started 

Salesforce Activity Sync is now available on staging, check out the Vanilla Success Community for documentation or reach out to your CSM for more details on how to get started.