Who Is Salesforce Identity For?

Identity for Employees

Your company’s employees, also called internal Salesforce users, need a simple, secure way to access your Salesforce org, other apps, and services. That simple, secure way is Salesforce Identity for Employees. All employees with a paid Salesforce license in the Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer Editions have full access to Salesforce identity services. For employees who need access to identity services only, you can purchase the Identity Only license.

With Salesforce Identity for Employees, you can remove barriers that slow employees down while maintaining robust security controls. For example, you can enable single sign-on (SSO) for your employees to give them one-click access to third-party productivity tools and services, such as Gmail or internal services like a company employee benefits app. Through this service, employees log in once to access everything that’s authenticated through SSO. This service saves your employees' time and the headache of keeping multiple passwords for multiple apps. It also ensures that only authenticated users access your company’s resources. And with multi-factor authentication (MFA), you can be twice as confident that you know who is logging in to your orgs and services.

You can also control what data employees are authorized to access. Using external client apps and OAuth, you define who sees what. For instance, you can limit access to your customer accounts to sales and support roles with a Customer Accounts app. And you can monitor and manage who is accessing your org, services, and data with identity monitoring services.

Salesforce Customer Identity

Another group of users that accesses your Salesforce orgs and Experience Cloud sites includes your customers, prospective customers, patients, partners, and dealers. We sometimes refer to these users as external users because they are outside the company network, but most often we call these users customers and partners.

Customers and partners can connect with your company through one of several channels: the web, an app, an API, a device, or a product. Customer Identity helps your company recognize these users across all channels and build a multidimensional picture of them. They’re no longer inert, isolated chunks of identity information in your contacts database. Now they’re real users who can log in and interact with other engaged members of your company’s vibrant online community.

Customer Identity is available when you purchase the External Identity license. Customer Identity enables customers and partners to self-register, log in, update their profile, and securely access web and mobile apps with a single identity. Plus, you can customize Customer Identity to your specific business process and brand using the power of the Salesforce Platform.

Note The External Identity license applies to Experience Cloud users who don’t already have a community license.

With Customer Identity, you can take advantage of out-of-the-box SSO capabilities for popular social networks. So your customers and partners can sign in to your site using their credentials from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or another social provider. You can even use this feature to register new user accounts automatically, without requiring customers to fill in a form. And your customers and partners can use SSO to move seamlessly between your sites and a third-party website without encountering disruptive login screens.

Customer Identity is part of the Salesforce Platform. It harnesses the power of the platform to give a complete and consistent picture of each customer to multiple divisions of your business. For example, you can configure SSO to create both a new user and an associated contact record. Then you can kick off an email communication campaign to drive engagement. Or you can open a task to remind an account executive to give the new customer a welcome call.