Keeping customers and partners satisfied and connected with a common thread is one of the challenges that organizations are facing redundantly. With the presence of technology and online communities, businesses still need a dedicated platform that keeps their customers and partners engaged and close to the brand.

These communities are constantly growing as an enriching source of information for a company’s product or services or for providing industry-grade customer services. Positively inverted shopping behavior and increasing loyalty are what organizations are deriving from these communities.

Salesforce Communities is one of the best examples of this, as it enables businesses to bring all their customers, employees, and partners together and manage them efficiently.

This blog narrates the story of Salesforce Community Cloud. You will discover more about Community Cloud, Experience Cloud, its features, benefits, licenses, and more.

What is Community Cloud or Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Community Cloud is a hybrid private cloud. This online social platform with multi-tenant architecture extends key business operations across departments in real time, addresses customers quickly, and closes deals as quickly as possible.

Community Cloud serves multiple purposes by creating different types of communities. Teams can utilize these communities for customer feedback, lead qualification, customer support, and services, training employees, creating a flow of employee interaction channels, etc.

The renaming of Salesforce Community as Salesforce Experience Cloud anchors the scope for offering customers a comprehensive buying lifecycle with the organization.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud, and how has it elevated the capabilities of Salesforce Community Cloud? Let’s discuss this as well.

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform that allows companies to create digital experiences for their customers, employees, and partners. It provides tools and services for creating mobile apps, portals, and communities and managing customer interactions across multiple channels. Salesforce Community Cloud comprises a few hand-picked capabilities of the following Salesforce Cloud:

• Community Cloud: A platform for creating online communities where customers, employees, and partners can connect and collaborate.
• Marketing Cloud: A suite of tools for digital marketing, including email, social media, and mobile marketing.
• Service Cloud: A platform for customer service and support, including live chat, case management, and knowledge management.
• Commerce Cloud: A platform for creating and managing e-commerce experiences, including product catalogs, shopping carts, and order management.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Features

• Personalized Interaction: This feature helps create a personalized experience for customers and partners, allowing them to find the information they need easily.
• Business Integration: This feature enables the integration and connection of data from third-party sources and systems.
• Customization Options: This feature offers a variety of pre-built themes and templates to ensure that your communities match your brand image. Community Cloud enables organizations to create custom, branded portals for their customers, partners, and employees. These portals can be tailored to meet specific needs and requirements and can be designed to match the organization’s look and feel.
• Easy-to-Access: This feature ensures that your communities can collaborate and access information from any device, anywhere in the world. It is designed to be mobile-responsive, ensuring that the community portals are accessible and usable on all devices.
• Create Better Engagement: This feature allows you to create online communities and keep members active and engaged.
• Community Management & Analytics: This feature provides valuable insights into your community members’ behavior and interests, enabling you to customize and optimize your services and products based on their needs.
• Social Collaboration Tools: It provides various tools and features to facilitate social collaboration and engagement, including discussion forums, Q&A, comments, and likes.
• Gamification and Rewards: This Cloud supports gamification, enabling organizations to motivate and engage their stakeholders by offering rewards, recognition, and incentives.

Types of Communities

Salesforce Experience Cloud or Community Cloud comprises three categories of communities that companies usually build for connecting various groups of users:

1. Customer Community

A Customer Community is a self-service platform for customers to connect and provide feedback and guidance. Customers can share important updates or help fellow members through FAQs, documentation, articles, or having an active discussion with others. Customer Communities aid in curating the best customer journey and accelerate engagement without employee intervention.

2. Partner Community

This community is a hotspot for information seekers in mostly Business-to-business organizations. Here the Sales team and resellers seek different information and effortlessly close more deals by communicating easily. This platform empowers partners to perform tasks like managing business activities, following best practices, getting relevant references, and safely getting in touch with Salesforce employees.

3. Internal Employee Community

This internal community is used by the HR and IT team. Major usage cases are connecting and assembling files, searchable knowledge references, project management, and the organization’s legal documentation in one space. With the help of this community, employees can enhance their knowledge and become more productive.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Statistics

You will wonder about the facts and figures that claim the popularity of Salesforce Experience Cloud across the countries.

• As per data from Salesforce, more than 10 million digital experiences are already created with Experience Cloud.
• In the entire Salesforce’s history, Salesforce Experience Cloud is known as the fastest-growing product having a 158% year-over-year growth rate in Quarter 2 of 2021.
• According to a recent survey conducted by Salesforce, 80% of customers anticipate real-time responsiveness from companies, indicating the significance of tailored and punctual experiences.
• A distinct survey conducted by Salesforce revealed that 86% of marketers consider establishing a unified customer journey across all interaction points as a primary objective for their organization.
• Salesforce Experience Cloud is serving different industries having some highly popular companies as its user bases:
  American Express, Dell Technologies, Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, Toyota, U.S. Bank, Panasonic, Pearson Education, Sonos, The Home Depot, Unilever, Vodafone, Zurich Insurance, Siemens Healthineers, KeyBank, and a lot more.

Step-by-Step Process Of Salesforce Experience Cloud Implementation

Steps to Enable Digital Experience – 

Following are the steps to enable Digital Experience:

1. To set up Digital Experience, search for Digital Experience setting in Quick Find Box and click on it.
2. Now click on the Setting button to enable Digital Experience.
3. A new section will appear when you select the checkbox for naming the domain name. Select the name of your domain very carefully, as you won’t be able to change it once it is created.
4. After finalizing your domain name, click on save.

You can now create several communities based on your license.

Check out how you can create a community – 

After enabling it, you next should create a new one and make it available to the end users.

1. Search for “All Sites” in setup and select it.
2. To create a new Experience Site, locate the New button and click on it.
3. A page containing pre-defined templates you can later use for your community based on the requirements will appear. For instance, if you’re creating a community for customer support, you can opt for the Customer Service template. Additionally, you can create and customize your templates.
4. Click Get Started on the next page after selecting the template.
5. Name your community, add a unique value at the end of the URL, and complete the process by clicking the Create button.

NOTE: You can only create one community without a custom URL if you own multiple communities. Because all the communities are under the same domain name, they can be differentiated via a custom URL path.

Once your community is created in the Salesforce Org, you will automatically be redirected to the community workspace. In this workspace, you can create and customize community pages, their interface, etc. Also, you can manage the community members from this workspace itself.

The next step is activating and publishing the community to make it accessible.

Activate the Experience Site –

Follow the below steps to activate the community:

1. Locate and click on All Communities from Setup.
2. Go to Workspaces
3. Click on Administration.
4. In the left panel, go to Settings and click on Activate Community button.

Congratulations, your community is now activated. The last and final step is to publish it.

Publish the Experience Site –

Complete publishing of the Experience Site with these simple steps:

1. Go to All Sites in Setup and then to Builder.
2. From the top right corner of Builder, click on Publish.

Voila! Your communities are all set for end-users.

Best Practices for Experience Cloud Implementation

While it may be tempting to start building an Experience Cloud site right away, it’s advisable to take the time to carefully consider which combination of features will be most effective in achieving your goals. While we cannot cover every planning aspect, the following topics highlight some of the best practices that you should consider, and integrate into your overall plan.

1. Identify the Vision and Objectives of Your Site

With Experience Cloud, you can easily build sites to ensure the delivery of a customer-first experience to everyone at a good speed. Before you enter the development of the Experience cloud site, it’s better to brainstorm. Discuss with the included team to draw the vision and objectives of creating an experience cloud site and what you want it to accomplish. It eases the development process.

2. Determine Roles for Experience Cloud

Developing an Experience Cloud site comprises multiple roles like development, designing, or maintenance. Each role comes with its responsibility and skillset, so you are not assigning all the roles to one person. Depending on your organization’s size and how you plan to scale your site, assign roles to different people and make them responsible for carrying out role-related tasks.

3. Work on Content Management Strategy

If your site plan contains a lot of content, then a proper content management strategy is what you need. A solid plan for creating, organizing, managing, and optimizing content. When the right content is displayed to the right people at the right time, it will surprisingly deliver you the result that you are seeking. Construct a content management plan and empower its different scenarios with the capabilities of Experience cloud offerings.

4. Keep Track of Customer Journey and Level Up Your Engagement Approaches

To enhance customer engagement and create a personalized site experience, it is essential to understand your customers’ needs and preferences. Salesforce Experience Cloud offers powerful features to track and analyze customer behavior, create targeted content, and facilitate interactions within your customer community. By integrating with other Salesforce products, you can create a seamless omnichannel experience and deliver value to your customers.

5. Do Not Forget Mobile: It Keeps Every User Close

Approximately 70 percent of customer interactions take place over mobile devices. If creating a mobile-friendly site isn’t on your requirement list, immediately prioritize it. Every user is accessible through mobile devices; they all feel at ease interacting with any business over the Internet. Create a mobile-responsive site to become reachable by each visitor on your site.

Here is how implementing Salesforce Experience Cloud for Wilhelmsen helped better user experience and easy data migration.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Benefits

When it’s all about leveraging competency and streamlining interaction, no solution available in the market can pull it out as Salesforce Experience Cloud does.

1. Enhance the Connections With Clients And Partners

For a business to grow, it is essential to strengthen relationships with all the stakeholders. The better the business terms, the faster your business will grow. Customers always try to approach the company to get their questions answered. Communities here can shine brighter by providing them with a platform to help each other and get answers from agents immediately.

Simultaneously, partners can collaborate, network, and exchange information and resources by staying active in Partner Communities. It allows your teams to expand brand awareness and credibility and know how well customers get along with your products and services.

2. An Opportunity to Improve Your Products and Services

Teams can collect feedback and customers’ opinions through the Customer Community and evaluate the current market potential of the products and services offered by the organization. Also, you can keep track of emerging market trends and analyze customers’ continuously changing buying behavior to customize or launch new products. This could act as a medium for facilitating customer satisfaction.

3. Establishing Better Grounds For Customer Support

Communities built over Community Cloud generate reports having customer data on different parameters. Managers and reps can reference those reports to identify how well customers are getting served by the internal teams and where they are mostly facing troubles. This way, you can always ensure that each posted query gets answered correctly and on time.

4. Save Time & Money

The primary task of Communities is to connect related parties. Be it your customer or client, when they interact with each other, your team’s involvement automatically gets reduced. Now that the time and money invested in addressing repetitive and common issues are saved, your teams can direct their efforts on more strategic and revenue-generating tasks. 

5. Boost Employee Productivity

Experience Cloud presents all categories of data in one package, allowing employees to access required information and formulate the next best action step. In addition, they can also transmit reports and data across all the departments, helping them in boosting performance and facilitate smoother communication within the organization.

6. Easy Integration

With Experience Cloud, you can either use Salesforce’s native integration as well create a customized API to connect backend systems for merging multiple sources. Whichever you select, it should permit your users to access data in hand and when required. Integrations will make way for you to take entire customer & partner-related data to deliver the best services and support at the time.

Salesforce Experience Cloud: Licenses

Following are the available licenses for Salesforce Experience Cloud:

1. Customer Community License

They are used for creating the best Business-to-consumer experiences, having many external users who keep looking for familiar case objects or resources. The Customer Community can be used with personal accounts.

2. Customer Community Plus License

Best choice for B2C Communities for providing their customers with top-notch collaboration and customer services without meddling with sales instances. This License offers delegated user administration, content libraries, reports & dashboards, and Advanced (Apex, role-based) record sharing.

3. Partner Community Cloud License

For B2B Companies involved in distribution channel selling, a Partner Community Cloud License is a premium option them. Using this License, teams can access, create, and edit sales data and various Salesforce objects as per their respective communities’ needs.

4. Lightning External Apps Starter Licenses

This License offers a customized experience to external stakeholders and ensures that Customer Loyalty and Brand engagement are taken care of. It comes with limited Salesforce CRM objects but still has additional functionalities like API-based calls, data, and file storage.

5. Lightning External Apps Plus Licenses

External Apps Plus License lets teams perform high-level customization through CRM and custom objects and has Lightning External Apps Starter license capabilities. Dealers, Supplier portals, Vendors, Marketplace owners, and Franchisers can make the best of it by putting every feature to use.

Apart from buying a member-based license, businesses can also get a permit based on Login requirements. One must be aware of the specific number of logins they will be having every month. One login is utilized every time an external user who is linked with a license logs into a website. No matter how many times they log in multiple times in one single day, one login is counted.

Login based Licenses are often referred to as:

• Customer Community Login,
• Customer Community Plus Login
• Partner Community Login,
• External Apps Login
• Channel Account Login respectively.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Pricing

Check out the prices of different licenses of Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Experience Cloud Use Cases

Experience Cloud has helped businesses from different industries write their success stories. With just Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation in your business models, you can experience considerable growth and never-ending revenue opportunities.

Some use cases of Experience Cloud in different industries are:

1. Finance

By Managing confidential information and keeping secure finance-based information, Experience Cloud is popular among financial institutions and financial service providers. Its functionalities allow businesses to maintain security and standard compliance requirements.

2. Educational Institutions

Another good feature is sharing references, important information, research material, knowledge sources, and educational contacts on the cloud. In this case, Communities can aid a lot in group studies or group projects, allowing users to conduct question-and-answer sessions.

3. Public and Government Sectors

Whatever the information, reports, or data is created and transmitted in different departments in the Public and Government Sectors, everything is considered sensitive and needs to be kept privileged. Experience Cloud in Salesforce helps maintain secure communications. It secures infrastructure so that no matter what and where the interaction occurs, it won’t jeopardize the security concern. Federal Agencies customize government clouds with highly secure models.

4. HealthCare

Experience Cloud has expanded its territory to the Health Care sector as well. Information related to patient’s health, medicines, pharmaceuticals, healthcare solutions, etc., should be kept undisclosed while collaborating with different parties.

The Final Words

To enhance your company’s growth, Salesforce Experience Cloud is a valuable tool to consider. These communities offer your clients a way to communicate with your business and each other, resulting in exceptional customer service.

A Salesforce Implementation Partner can help you reap the benefits of increased customer engagement, increased sales, and heightened customer satisfaction. With stronger employee connections, and the ability to collaborate with your customers, co

mplete access to data insights is an added advantage.

No matter the size of your business, a Salesforce Implementation partner can create a fully functional portal for your customers and tailor the online customer experience to meet your needs.

At Cyntexa, we have over 300 Salesforce experts who are versed in Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation and other Salesforce services. If providing value to your customers is a priority, connect with our experts to discuss your plans.