Customers, Chatter
A Chatter customer is an external user who is invited into a specific private Chatter group, and who can participate only inside the groups they have been invited to.
Definition
A Chatter customer is an external user who is invited into a specific private Chatter group, and who can participate only inside the groups they have been invited to. The label "Customers, Chatter" in Salesforce points at this category of user: someone from outside your company email domains who joins a conversation without becoming a full Salesforce user and without any access to records or business data.
Chatter customers exist for narrow external collaboration. A vendor, contractor, or client can post, comment, like, and share files inside one group, and see nothing else in the org. The feature predates Experience Cloud and is still supported today. Most richer external scenarios moved to Experience Cloud, but for a conversation-only group with a few outside people, Chatter customers stays the simplest option.
How Chatter customers work and where they fit
Who counts as a Chatter customer
A Chatter customer is anyone whose email address falls outside your company email domains and who has been invited into a private Chatter group. Salesforce treats these people as external by domain comparison. If someone shares your corporate domain, they are an internal coworker, not a customer, even when invited the same way. Chatter customers can act as ordinary group members or as group managers, and a manager-level customer can approve membership requests for that group. Inside Salesforce, internal users see customers marked with an orange corner indicator on their photo, so it is always visible who in a group is external. This visual cue matters in mixed groups where staff and outside participants post side by side. The point of the model is contained access: the customer joins one conversation, sees the other members of that conversation, and gets no view into the wider org. There is no profile browsing across the company and no record visibility. The customer experience is deliberately small, which is what makes it safe to extend to people you do not employ.
What a Chatter customer can and cannot do
Inside a group they belong to, a Chatter customer can post and comment, like posts, share and download files, receive @mentions, and view limited profiles of fellow members (photo, name, title, email, shared groups, files, and activity stats). They can use the Salesforce mobile app, with the same restrictions carried over. The list of what they cannot do is longer and intentional. Customers cannot access any Salesforce records or business data. They cannot follow people or files. They cannot own, create, delete, or independently join groups; they only ever arrive by invitation. They cannot post to user profiles, cannot see topics other than hashtag-style ones, and are never surfaced in recommendations. Search is also walled off: a customer cannot see search results that contain company information. Put together, these limits mean the customer lives entirely within the boundary of their group or groups. Anything an internal user references, like a linked record or a mention of a non-member, stays invisible to the customer even when it appears in a post they can read.
Chatter Customer Groups
Customers can only ever be added to a private Chatter group that allows customers. A standard private group becomes customer-enabled when its owner or a manager turns on the allow-customers option, and that choice is one-way in practice: once a group has hosted external members it is treated as a customer group. Public groups never accept customers, because public content is visible to the whole org and would break the containment model. The group looks normal to internal users, with the added orange indicators on any external members. Posts in the group are visible only to its members, so nothing a customer sees or writes leaks to the broader company feed, and nothing from the broader company feed leaks to the customer. A single customer can belong to several customer groups at once, and their access is simply the union of those groups. This is the unit of control: you decide what a customer sees by deciding which groups they are in, and there is no finer-grained setting beneath the group itself.
Enabling and inviting
Customer invitations are controlled at the org level under Setup, in Chatter Settings, by the Allow Customer Invitations checkbox. When Chatter itself is enabled, customer invitations are on by default, so in many orgs the capability already exists without anyone turning it on. Once enabled, the owner or a manager of a customer-allowed private group invites people by entering their email addresses, separated by commas, with an optional message. New customers receive a welcome email containing a unique username and password generated for them. They cannot reach your group with any other Salesforce login they may already hold, and if they lose their credentials they use Forgot Password to reset. One constraint catches teams off guard: customer invitations do not work with My Domain login URLs, single sign-on domains, or domains that have IP-range restrictions. Orgs that rely on those controls cannot onboard Chatter customers through the standard invitation flow, which is one practical reason many such orgs reach for Experience Cloud instead. The feature is available across Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Contact Manager, and Developer editions.
Chatter customers versus Experience Cloud
Experience Cloud, the product once called Community Cloud, is the modern way to give outside people a real portal. It supports branded sites, controlled access to records, single sign-on, deal registration for partners, and self-service support for customers. Chatter customers do none of that. They get a conversation in a group and nothing more. The trade is capability against cost and effort. Chatter customers are free to set up and instant to use, with no site to build and no per-user license to provision for the basic group case. Experience Cloud is far more capable but needs design work and licensing. The two are not mutually exclusive, and an org can run both: Experience Cloud for a customer support portal, Chatter customer groups for a one-off project chat with a contractor. The decision is mostly about scope. If outside people only need to talk inside one group, customers fit. The moment they need to see records, use a branded experience, or follow a self-service flow, Experience Cloud is the right call and the cleaner long-term home.
Governance, offboarding, and a worked example
Because customer access persists until someone removes it, the main risk is drift. A contractor finishes a project, the group goes quiet, and the customer keeps their seat in it indefinitely. The fix is an offboarding habit: a group owner or manager removes members through the Add or Remove Members option on the group, and an admin can deactivate the underlying user from Setup. Treat group contents as discoverable, because posts are stored in Salesforce and searchable through Chatter, so any record-retention or legal-hold rules that apply to internal Chatter apply here too. A worked example: a logistics firm hires an outside analyst for a six-week pricing review. An admin confirms Allow Customer Invitations is on, the project lead creates a private group, enables customers on it, and invites the analyst by email. The analyst accepts, posts findings, and shares spreadsheets with the internal team, seeing none of the company opportunities or accounts. At week seven the lead removes the analyst from the group and the admin deactivates the account, closing the access cleanly without a portal ever being involved.
How to set up and manage Chatter customers
Turn on customer invitations at the org level, then create a private group that allows customers and invite the external people. These steps are done by an admin plus a group owner or manager.
- Confirm customer invitations are enabled
In Setup, type Chatter in Quick Find and open Chatter Settings. Check that Allow Customer Invitations is selected. When Chatter is enabled this box is usually on by default, so often you are just confirming it.
- Create or pick a private group and allow customers
Create a Chatter group with access set to private, or open an existing private group you own or manage. Turn on the option that lets the group accept customers. Public groups cannot host customers, so the group must be private.
- Invite the external people by email
On the group detail page, use Invite People or Add or Remove Members. Enter the external email addresses separated by commas and add an optional message, then send. Each new customer receives a welcome email with a unique username and password.
- Remove access when the work ends
When collaboration is done, open Add or Remove Members on the group and remove the customer, and have an admin deactivate the underlying user in Setup. This closes access cleanly so external seats do not linger.
Org-level checkbox in Setup, Chatter Settings. Must be on for any group to invite customers. Enabled by default when Chatter is enabled.
Customers can join private groups only. Set the group to private before enabling customers on it.
Group-level setting the owner or manager turns on so the private group can accept external members.
A customer can be a plain member or a manager. Manager-level customers can approve membership requests for that group.
- Customer invitations do not work with My Domain login URLs, single sign-on domains, or domains that have IP-range restrictions. Orgs using those controls often move to Experience Cloud instead.
- Customers cannot reach your group with an existing Salesforce login. They must use the unique username and password from the welcome email; lost credentials are reset via Forgot Password.
- Access lasts until you remove it. Build an offboarding step, because finished projects otherwise leave external participants in old groups indefinitely.
- Anything referenced in a post, such as a linked record or a mention of a non-member, stays invisible to the customer even when they can read the post itself.
Prefer this walkthrough as its own page? How to Customers, Chatter in Salesforce, step by step
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Chatter Customers in Private GroupsSalesforce
- Add or Remove Customers in Chatter GroupsSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Customers, Chatter.
- Customer InvitationsSalesforce
- Chatter Customers in Private GroupsSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Customers, Chatter.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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Q1. What can a Chatter Customer see inside a Salesforce org?
Q2. Which license makes a Chatter Customer possible and at what cost?
Q3. For larger-scale external collaboration with branded UI and record access, what does Salesforce point to instead of Chatter Customers?
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