As a Salesforce Admin, you’ll inevitably help troubleshoot login issues for users many times over the course of your career. Identifying areas of frequent issues or confusion will help save both you and your users time and energy. As a result, I’ve compiled some tips and tricks to help you identify the cause of some common login issues.
One of the most common user login issues happens before users ever log in for the first time. When new users don’t verify their account before trying to log in to Salesforce, this will prevent them from logging in at all.
Verifying New User Accounts
First, when setting up a new user, the ‘Generate new password and notify user immediately’ checkbox at the bottom of the user page is checked by default. Keep this setting so that your user receives an email to activate their new Salesforce account.
Users will receive an auto-generated email from Salesforce. The email prompts the user to verify their account and provides the org’s URL and their username.
When users receive this email, they must click the Verify Account button before they can do anything else. If they click the org URL link to log in without first verifying their account, they will not be able to log in. This is because their account hasn’t been verified and they haven’t set a password yet.
Once users click the Verify Account button, they are rerouted to another screen. On the following screen, they can set their password and security question.
Using Email Address to Log In
Another common issue that Admins frequently end up troubleshooting in Salesforce is when users enter the wrong username. This issue prevents users from logging in, and users frequently aren’t aware they’re entering the wrong username. As Admins, it’s helpful to educate users on how emails and usernames are used in Salesforce. Specifically users should know that:
- Emails and usernames can be different
- The same emails can be used across multiple Salesforce orgs
- Username must be unique for each Salesforce org
Users must make sure that they’re entering their unique username for the correct Salesforce org to attempt to log in, otherwise, they will run into issues. Next, let’s discuss how Admins can easily identify when the wrong username is being entered by a user.
Troubleshooting User Login Issues
When first troubleshooting a user’s login issue, navigate to their user detail page. At the top of the user detail page, if you see the Unlock button, click the button to unlock the account.
This button only appears when a user is locked out of Salesforce due to too many failed login attempts. This can also be verified in the Login History section at the bottom of the user details page.
Unlocking the account does not reset the user password. It just unlocks the account so the user can attempt to log in again.
If the user enters an incorrect password, the Login History will display the login attempt status as “Invalid Password.”
If this is consistently occurring, the user likely just needs a password reset.
However, if you’ve already completed a password reset and the user is still having trouble, it’s important to take note of what’s not showing in the Login History.
If the Login History is blank, or you notice another discrepancy like you don’t see any login attempts in the history for today, or at the time the user told you they attempted to log in, it’s most likely that the user is using the wrong Salesforce URL (such as mistakenly using a sandbox URL or another org’s URL), or they are using the wrong username.
If this happens, provide the user with the org’s URL by copying and pasting everything in the URL up to “.com” their username to them.
With these tips and tricks, you should be able to resolve your user’s login issues in record time! However, if you need to dive deeper to troubleshoot further in Salesforce, it may be helpful to log in as the user that’s experiencing issues to see what they’re seeing on their end.
Check out my related post below on how to do this!
Additional Resources
- Log In As Any User in Salesforce
- Salesforce Help: Troubleshoot Login Issues
- Mike Wheeler Salesforce Administrator Certification Course
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