Cannot assign a role for a Customer Community User

Question

I understand that Community Roles are being created once you create the first user for that specific account. However, when trying to assign the Role, the dropdown is empty.

So, what I already validated is to check if the Account Owner and the Contact Owner had a role assigned which they do. I don't think it has to do but was just a validation.

I also renamed the community default roles for custom in the community administration to see if that enabled the role but not luck.

Finally I validated the Sharing settings and the checkbox Community User Visibility is disabled which is what I need.

What I'm missing? It was my understanding that those roles were created automatically by salesforce once you create the first user for that account.

Answer 1

It sounds as though you must have a Customer Community Plus license. Regular Customer Communities do not use Roles, instead they only use Profiles. You could say they "quasi-inherit" their Role from their Owner.

If you are using a Community Plus license, for best performance, you really only want to use 1 single role per account throughout your community and not create multiple roles for every account (up to 3). See Set the Default Number of Community Roles in the Help for more on this.

There's also an option to automatically use the User's Account Name for their Role by enabling "Show Company Name as Community Role" in Community Management under Member Administration. See Set Custom Community Roles in the Help for more details.

EDIT 01/22/2022

To actually get one role for an entire Experience Cloud Portal that uses the Community Plus license, you need to first enable a feature called Account Role Optimization (ARO). If you read the documentation you'll see this solution is intended only for users created as person accounts and isn't for users with Partner Licenses.

Be aware using ARO has a significant impact on role based sharing rules which you'll want to carefully consider before implementing it. In an existing portal, you'd also need to update each user via apex using code along the lines of the following:

User u = new User();
u.Id = '<user id>';
u.PortalRole = 'PersonAccount';
update u;