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Create Tasks in Salesforce from your Customer.io messages

You can send message information to Salesforce—the emails you send, whether or not people click them, and so on. In Salesforce, you’ll typically record these events as Tasks. When you send message events to Salesforce, you’ll need to map a few fields to make sure that Salesforce processes your message activity tasks properly.

Set up an action to create tasks in Salesforce

You may want to set up different actions for different kinds of events, depending on the data you want to associate with people. But typically, you can set up a single action to send all message events to Salesforce as tasks.

1. Go to your Salesforce integration’s Actions tab and click Add Action.
2. In the Action dropdown, select Custom Object.

   

   
3. In the Trigger step, make sure Any conditions are true.
4. Set the first condition to Track Event Name is Email Sent.
5. (Optional) Click Add Condition and repeat the previous step but set the event name for each message event you want to capture.

   

   
6. For the Operation, select Create new record.

   

   
7. Scroll down and set the Salesforce Object to Task.

   

   
8. Next to Other Fields, click Add Key/Value and map the following fields. Note that when you map fields, any values that contain a $ are variables! You’ll need to type them in the drop-down Variables box when you select a field rather than directly in the text field.

   Field	Value	Description
   TaskSubtype	Email	Salesforce has a limited number of task subtypes, but this is the one that best reflects messages.
   Subject	$.event: $.properties.subject	This is what your tasks will show in Salesforce. For example: Email Sent: Subject Line. We type a plain : value in between the event and the subject line to make it easier to read in Salesforce.
   Priority	Normal	Other available values are High and Low.
   Status	Completed	Message events occur after the event, so the status is always completed.
   OwnerId		This is the Salesforce User you want to associate with this task. You’ll find this in the URL of a user in Salesforce. For example: User/003TH000004n83lYAA/view. See Finding your Owner ID for more information.
   WhoId	$.properties.userId	This is the Salesforce Contact ID of the person your messages are for.
   ActivityDate	$.timestamp	This is the date and time of the event.

Find your Owner ID

Salesforce tasks reference two people: the Contact or Lead that the task is for (represented by the WhoId field) and the Salesforce user who is responsible for the task. This is the OwnerId field that you’ll set when you set up your action.

The message events that we send to Salesforce to create tasks follow a specific format. While they contain a value representing the WhoId of the person your messages are for, they don’t contain a value for the OwnerId, and there’s no way to pass this value in the events.

That means that you’ll set a static OwnerId for all of the tasks coming from Customer.io—all your tasks are owned by the same Salesforce user. It may help to create a new Salesforce user to act as the owner of all your Customer.io tasks.

In Salesforce, you’ll find a UserID in the URL when you look at a user’s profile—for example, User/003TH000004n83lYAA/view.

Message event triggers

You’ll set up your action to create tasks in Salesforce for the different kinds of “message events” you want to capture. The process above works for all message events, but you’ll need to set up your action’s trigger with all the different message events that you want to capture in Salesforce. These are the available message events in Customer.io: