Why are existing customers having difficulty logging in to our site?
Environment:
Customer login to end-user customer portal
Resolution:
End-users may have difficulty logging in to the Login page in some cases if they have entered their User ID and email address in different cases.
If you have edited your end-user pages to encourage your site visitors to enter their email address as their User ID, keep in mind that there are still two distinct fields being used -- the User ID field, which is case sensitive and the Email Address field, which saves email addresses in all lowercase letters.
Note: It is not possible to make the User ID field insensitive to the case used.
What can happen is that an end-user creates a contact record by entering an email address that includes capital letters, such Jane_Smith@MyCompany.com. If this value is entered in both the User ID and Email Address fields, it will be saved in the customer record as:
User ID: Jane_Smith@MyCompany.com
Email Address: jane_smith@mycompany.com
In this case, if Jane returns to log in to the Login, she must enter the value specified in the User ID field in order to successfully log in or request the account password.
In this case, Jane must enter "Jane_Smith@MyCompany.com" to log in successfully or to request the password to be sent. If she tries to log in using "jane_smith@mycompany.com", she will be denied access and she will not be able to have her login password emailed to herself.
At that point, due to the difficulty of trying to log in, many end-users will try to create a new account. However, if they try to use the same email address, they will receive the account creation failed message because their email address is already used in the Email Address field for the initial account.
To investigate this: From the administrative pages, search for the contact record by the email address. Next, view the contact record to see the entries for the User ID and Email Address fields. To successfully log in, the customer MUST enter the values specified in the User ID and Password fields -- and these are both case-sensitive fields. Once you find the contact record, you can provide the specific log in information to that customer or edit the record if the customer indicates the desire to do so.
If you have edited the User ID message base to encourage end-users to use their email address as their User ID, you may want to edit the message base further to indicate that the field is case-sensitive. In this way, your site visitors are more inclined to enter their User ID correctly each time they visit your site.
For more information on editing message bases, refer to Answer ID 383: Determining Which Message Base to Edit.
