What Is Salesforce Experience Cloud?
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What Is Salesforce Experience Cloud? Its Features & Benefits

July 31, 2023
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    In this technology-driven world, authentic relationships and person-to-person interactions have still been the key to the actual success of the business.

    Businesses are undoubtedly trying their best to deliver the best customer support services, but they fail to comprehend user requirements because of not having a good communication platform.

    However, to fill these gaps and provide seamless customer-centric support, Salesforce Experiences Cloud comes into the picture.

    In this blog, let’s understand what is Salesforce Experience Cloud more broadly, its features, and its benefits. Read on!

    → Click here to download our free guide to Salesforce Experience Cloud Implementation [Download Now].

    What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

    what is Salesforce Experience Cloud
    what is Salesforce Experience Cloud Dark

    Salesforce Experience Cloud, earlier known as Community Cloud, is a digital experience platform in Salesforce that aids companies in building a digital space for all their customers, partners, and employees for seamless communication and data sharability. 

    This platform offers various tools and services for creating mobile apps, portals, and communities that help accelerate customer interactions while allowing you to manage them across multiple channels. 

    It is a blend of features of CRM, CMS, and pre-built apps that offer you solution-building capabilities for every business use case. You can create personalized and engaging experiences for your customers by leveraging its little or no-code capabilities.

    Salesforce Community Cloud comprises a few hand-picked yet versatile capabilities of multiple Salesforce Clouds:

    • 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 catalogues, shopping carts, and order management.

    If you want a deeper insight into what is Salesforce, read our previous blog now.

    Features of Salesforce Experience Cloud

    Now that you have gone through what is Salesforce Experience Cloud. Let us now understand the top features of Salesforce Experience Cloud that would help businesses to improve customer experience:

    1. Personalization

    Customers are more likely to opt for a brand that ensures a personalized experience. Brands that trigger the ‘relatability factor’ for customers gain engagement and loyalty faster. Therefore, to ensure the same, you must understand the customer’s purchase history, behaviours, interests, and requirements. 

    By leveraging Salesforce Experience Cloud, businesses can seamlessly unlock the benefits of interacting with customers, clients, and remote employees. The personalization feature allows you to create experiences that feel relatable to your customers and business teams. 

    With the advanced AI capabilities it offers, you can recommend to your customers and teams their interest groups and provide relevant and customizable information to engage them better.

    2. Business integration

    With this feature of Experience Cloud, you can enable integration and data sharability across third-party systems. You can integrate various solutions and applications to extend the current capabilities of your platform. Moreover, you can connect various processes, starting from sales, service, and marketing to product development, allowing easy data shareability. 

    Leverage it for your customers to simplify their case submission process, for partners so they can qualify quality leads and opportunities, and for your employees so they can collaborate efficiently.  

    With this, you can ensure a long-term journey by delivering your customers an intelligent and relevant experience.

    3. Customization with Experience Builder

    Salesforce’s Experience Builder allows you to design an experience for your customers that showcases your brand identity. Using the pre-built templates that it offers, you can create a UI without any codes or clicks. 

    Do a few customizations, such as uploading your logo, setting the colour scheme, and adding content, and your portal is ready. You can create custom, branded portals for your 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.

    Also, the Experience Builder grants permission to create different experiences for one site and then further set up pages, navigation menus, components, and other criteria while being dependent on what one would like the users to see.

    If you also want to learn about the Salesforce Experience Cloud Implementation process, check here.

    Fill the form to access our exclusive webinar presentation!

    4. Sales-Force Automation 

    Allow your partners to gain a seamless experience and on-time updates through automation with everything in sales. 

    With this, you can share contacts, leads, records, pricing quotes, and order information with your partners, making the sales process better and faster. You get a comprehensive view of all your inventory, its pricing, and related orders on a single page, enabling easy management. Additionally, take control of user access and allow relevant users to update the status of deal registrations and facilitate seamless lead distribution among teams. 

    Moreover, you can integrate third-party apps as well that contribute to accelerating your sales process.

    5. E-commerce 

    It is one of the versatile features of Salesforce Experience Cloud as it allows you to create new ways for your customers to discover your product and services. That too, across multiple environments—web, mobile, or social. 

    Suppose, your customers are discussing a product, this feature enables its visibility in that particular discussion or social feed along with product details, helping in upselling. It allows you to put your product in the right place at the right time. 

    Soon, with the introduction of lighting components in this feature, you will be able to build an e-commerce shop in the Experience Cloud offering easy upselling opportunities. 

    6. Case Escalation 

    It allows your customers to create cases directly in the community platform, which can be answered by other customers, teams, and experts engaged there. Among a lot, of answers, the best one is marked at the top which is decided through user voting based on whether the answer was helpful or not. In case, any question goes unanswered, it is ultimately catered to by support agents, either privately or there itself, allowing visibility of other users. 

    This way, customers, employees, and experts come together to help each other, building strong connections over topics of interest. 

    7. Actions 

    Take the right action at the right time. This feature offers easy navigation to the next best action you are going to take. Also, you can create a customized action for what you want to do next. 

    Think of it this way, suppose you want to facilitate easy integration with a third-party application. You can create an action for the same in the feed itself. You have easy accessibility to it from a simple drop-down menu. 

    Moreover, you can easily deploy and test the actions, ensuring their proper functioning.

    Benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud

    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.

    Enhanced Collaboration Between Customers And Partners

    Businesses that are successful in establishing collaboration and stronger relationships with their customers and stakeholders are more likely to grow in the long term. Therefore, Salesforce Community Cloud offers you a platform where they can collaborate seamlessly and gain answers from support agents effectively. They can share helpful resources and exchange information across communities, expanding brand awareness and showcasing your dedication toward customer preferences. 

    An Opportunity To Improve Your Products And Services

    Your business teams can collect feedback and customers’ opinions through this Customer Community platform by analyzing the discussions and feedback they have shared.  It serves as a channel that makes it easier to get feedback from customers. 

    You can look into it to evaluate the current market potential of the products and services you offer. Also, you can keep track of emerging market trends and analyze customers’ continuously changing buying behaviour through this platform to customize or launch new products and make improvements to existing ones. 

    Establishing Better Grounds For Customer Support

    You can generate reports for different communities and analyze the data on various parameters. As discussed above, this platform acts as a medium for gaining customer feedback that helps you cater to your customers’ centric to their queries and issues. 

    Moreover, you can also review how well your teams are serving customers and where they are lacking. By looking into this data, you can improve your customer service practices and cater to customer queries accurately and efficiently.

    Easy Integration 

    With Experience Cloud, you can either perform Salesforce’s native integration or leverage APIs to connect third-party solutions and apps. Whichever option you opt for, you must ensure that it allows relevant access and permissions to your users as and when required. 

    These integrations help you make the best use of your customer data by enhancing capabilities and enabling you to deliver the best services and support at the time.

    Improved Productivity Across Teams 

    The versatile offerings by Experience Cloud enhance the productivity of your teams by simplifying their efforts toward portal creation and management. 

    With pre-built components, your teams do not have to design the portals from scratch, and its low-code capabilities allow your non-tech teams to contribute to the development process, giving their insights. Moreover, your website pages automatically adopt the chosen theme, eliminating repeatable development procedures. Through automation, your sales activities are streamlined across all areas, improving productivity. 

    Engage Remote Work Employees

    Being a cloud platform, Experience Cloud allows employees to access and manage the platform remotely. It ensures seamless interaction between remote employees and enables data sharability. They can collaborate with ease to understand business challenges and KPIs, eliminating the restriction of being present on the system all the time. 

    Better Manage Partners

    Salesforce Experience Cloud simplifies the customer and client management process more than ever before. It streamlines lead generation and sales processes to deliver an exceptional customer experience at every stage of their buyer and customer journey. Also, onboarding, recruiting, training, and supporting the partners with user-friendly features and tools built into the Salesforce portal to ensure a seamless user experience.

    Types of Templates Offered by Salesforce Experience Cloud 

    You get several pre-built templates that you can leverage and create sites specific to your needs and requirements. These templates eliminate the need to build sites from scratch and allow you to leverage the low-code capabilities for site creation. 

    Explore various templates: 

    1. Customer Service Templates

    It is a customer self-service template that has key questions listed along with their answers. You do not need to connect with any agent and can seek answers on your own. By providing a searchable knowledge base, customers can resolve questions on their own, reducing the need for agent intervention. 

    You can leverage your team’s and customers’ expertise collectively with tools like Chatter, where the best responses rise to the top, ensuring users always find reliable answers. 

    Also, you can structure your content around relevant topics to guide users to essential information, whether it’s popular content, recently updated resources, or featured insights—customizing the experience to fit your business’s unique needs.

    2. Customer Account Portal Templates 

    Empower your customers with a streamlined account portal that provides direct access to essential data and processes. 

    Customers can effortlessly update their vital information, including their account details, cases, claims, or custom objects, all from any device. Also, you can seamlessly integrate third-party systems like ERP and e-commerce platforms, offering a complete view of their data and processes in one place. 

    3. Partner Central Templates

    It streamlines your partner experience by delivering customized sales content that enhances productivity and engagement. 

    It simplifies onboarding and recruiting by automating forms, processes, and tasks at every stage while tracking partner progress with structured training and certification programs. 

    You can build workflows that eliminate lead conflicts, automate lead routing, and optimize quoting, with the added power of Einstein AI to intelligently recommend relevant content and resources. Also, drive demand and boost ROI by empowering partners to launch, track, and analyze marketing campaigns. Share ready-made materials and enable partners to create co-branded content, boosting your reach and impact. 

    4. ‘Design Your Own’ Templates

    Design your own unique digital experience with customizable features and spaces that look stunning on any device. 

    You can choose from several prebuilt themes and adjust colors, fonts, and styles according to your brand symbol to perfectly reflect your brand. You can also upload, store, and share branded content, from headers and logos to rich media and custom components, all within a lightweight Content Management System. 

    Manage your assets seamlessly in your asset library or connect content from your previous CMS, ensuring a cohesive and flexible experience that brings your brand to life.

    5. Add Components Templates 

    Using no-code customization and drag-and-drop components in Experience Builder’s library, you can create personalized digital experiences. 

    You can modify these components and place them wherever you need. You can customize each page, theme, and component for specific user groups so they see content relevant to them. 

    Integrate data from your legacy systems like SAP, Oracle, Mircosoft, and more in just a few clicks, eliminating the need for complex coding and designing everything from scratch. 

    6. Industry-Specific Templates

    You can choose from a number of industry-specific templates that are particularly centric to your industry. 

    Developed by the Salesforce partner ecosystem, these solutions are equipped with industry-specific processes, flows, apps, and other components that integrate seamlessly with your digital experience. 

    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. 
    • Salesforce’s annual State of the Connected Customer report reveals that 88% of customers believe that offering an optimal customer experience is as important as the quality of the product and service offerings of a business. 
    • A similar report reveals that 81% of businesses believe that it is customer experience only that differentiates them from their competitors. 
    • 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.
    • 56% of customers prefer offers that are more personalized to their needs and requirements. 
    • Salesforce Experience Cloud serves businesses across different industries, having some highly popular companies as its user base. The list of top companies includes Accenture, Magnet 360, Appirio, PWC, 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.

    Salesforce Experience Cloud Use Cases

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

    Let’s explore how Experience Cloud benefits diverse industries:  

    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. It empowers businesses to streamline relationships with customers and financial experts around the world. 

    Let’s understand with an example of Kotak Mahindra Bank and how Experience Cloud benefitted this business. 

    Kotak Mahindra streamlined its overall customer experience and also leveraged the cloud to other business areas, such as from retail assets to liabilities. They created a portal that streamlined their customer service, invoicing, and reporting processes. Also, their customers could now open savings accounts on their own, perform KYC, and verify other details. 

    Educational Institutions 

    Another versatile 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. 

    The example of Flame University can help you understand better. They managed their day-to-day challenges with Experience Cloud by adopting its click-not-code functionality and creating a student community portal. This portal was easy to maintain, could handle increased user load, and easily recovered from downtime, giving a frictionless experience to the users. This portal improved student engagement as prospective students came and inquired about admissions, placements, and other details, which would go directly to the sales team, and they could offer them guidance. Moreover, it also improved collaboration between existing students and faculty, allowing them to seek guidance over projects and assignments. 

    Automotive 

    Salesforce Experience Cloud offers a great and unique customer experience as well as facilitates easy collaboration with stakeholders, dealers, equipment manufacturers, and more. Customers can come to the platform and ask questions related to a vehicle or want to know if the car best fits their needs. They can gain answers from experts in this industry and could rectify any problems or issues. 

    Let’s see how Mahindra and Mahindra leveraged Salesforce Experience Cloud to their benefit. Their lead management was already streamlined using Salesforce; however, they leveraged Salesforce Experience Cloud to build a dealer portal to enhance collaboration and diminish lead response time. With this, dealers could gain insights into the conversation that the service agents had with customers, and in case they sought more help, dealers could pick up the conversation from where the agent left off. Moreover, not only for the customer’s front but also for dealers, businesses could resolve issues seamlessly. 

    Media and Entertainment

    Customer engagement and experience are the key drivers for this industry. Their revenue is dependent on how well they can cater to the entertainment needs of their customers. Therefore, Salesforce Experience Cloud acts as a versatile solution when it comes to creating personalized and engaging digital experiences for its users. 

    See how Salesforce Experience Cloud transformed operations for Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd. 

    Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. implemented Salesforce Experience Cloud to extend its CRM functionalities to its newspaper distribution network. This enabled lakhs of agents, who deliver newspapers and sell subscriptions, to accelerate their sales and distribution processes. The Experience Cloud platform allowed these agents to process sales directly from the field, reducing the need to manually manage processes and later visit a central station to upload data. This streamlined workflow helped agents realize revenue more rapidly and simplified the entire distribution lifecycle.

    Hospitality 

    This industry also prioritizes customer satisfaction and experience, which makes Salesforce Experience Cloud a must-have for all businesses in this industry. 

    Understand it better with the example of Spicejet. Experience Cloud enabled SpiceJet to develop specialized applications, like the mishandled baggage and lost-and-found apps, for quick lodging and resolution of baggage-related complaints. This allowed airport and airline staff to address customer issues directly through a digital platform, improving efficiency in baggage management. Moreover, to offer a safer, contactless experience amid COVID-19, SpiceJet deployed a WhatsApp chatbot for check-ins. This feature allowed customers to check in and receive e-boarding passes digitally, minimizing the need for physical interactions at the airport. Experience Cloud facilitated the creation of this automated system, significantly reducing wait times and enhancing passenger convenience.

    maximize customer engagement with experience cloud
    maximize customer engagement with experience cloud Dark

    Conclusion

    There you have it! Salesforce Experience Cloud empowers businesses to improve experiences and accelerate satisfaction for a wide range of business users, such as customers, employees, and industry experts. Not only this but by improving the customer experience and providing the best support, you can ensure a long-term journey with your customers, clients and other users. 

    In order to ensure a streamlined implementation of Salesforce Experience Cloud, opt for a reliable Salesforce implementation partner like Cyntexa. They offer streamlined Salesforce implementation services that help your business maximize customer engagement, allowing you to establish a corporate identity.

    They go by understanding your business objectives and needs, assessing your current infrastructure, building or recommending the optimal solution and offering continuous support.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    There is no such difference between Salesforce Community Cloud and Experience Cloud. In 2021, Salesforce rebranded Community Cloud to Experience Cloud. Earlier, it allows you to create communities seamlessly. But now, companies can build online communities for customers, partners, and employees, fostering collaboration and engagement while offering personalized experiences integrated with Salesforce CRM.

    A UK-based banking and financial company, JPMorgan Chase & Co., leveraging Salesforce Experience Cloud. Also, this cloud allows a company to create online communities for customers, partners, and employees for customer engagement.

    The Salesforce Experience Cloud is a versatile and feature-rich experience platform empowering organizations to create tailored and captivating interactions for their customers, partners, and employees.

    You can unfold several benefits with Salesforce Experience Cloud. These benefits involve creating engaging communities, enhancing customer support and self-service options, improving collaboration, and fostering brand loyalty.

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