5 Key Benefits of Using Salesforce Communities

Constant innovation in the digital space has led to a rise in customer expectations. And for organizations, it has become a challenge to keep pace with these changing demands in order to keep their customers satisfied.

To keep the customers more connected, brands of all sizes today focus on creating engaging online communities that deliver on-the-spot support. Communities open new avenues for brands to grow their customer base by attracting new audiences. Additionally, these also serve as an outlet using which brands can keep their customers informed.

The result? A positive customer experience along with the creation of strong brand advocates.

And that’s exactly what Salesforce communities promise to offer along with many other unique out-of-the-box functionalities. Let’s deep dive into the 101 of Salesforce communities and everything in between, shall we?

Salesforce Communities: All You Need to Know

Salesforce communities can be defined as closed spaces created especially for Salesforce users and customers. Using these communities, Salesforce users can connect with the community outside their org and collaborate.

The community is used by the customers to look up answers to specific queries or seek help from fellow community members. The Salesforce Experience Cloud is an online platform that enables brands to connect to their customers, employees, and partners with dedicated Salesforce communities.

Types of Salesforce Communities

To approach these communities more effectively, Salesforce gives brands the option to build multiple communities tailored to requirements, purpose, and community members.

Salesforce communities can be divided into three categories, namely:

• Customer Community: Your customers might come up with questions frequently. And if you don’t deliver accurate answers to them, you might risk losing them. This is where a customer community comes into play. By implementing a customer community, your customers can access discussion pages, FAQs, relevant articles, and product & service process documentation easily to find answers to questions, thus elevating CSAT.
• Partner Community: Partner communities are an ideal platform to stay connected and keep your partners and teams always informed. These are all-inclusive destinations combined on a single portal that delivers necessary and relevant information to your partners. Partners can become more productive and work in a streamlined way with a single portal and seek support whenever required.
• Employee Community: Your company employees are always on the lookout for ways to quickly share files, and information, access documentation, and read important company announcements. One effective method of managing it all is through an employee community. With this portal, you do not need multiple channels of communication.

Communities are indeed a strong part of the Salesforce ecosystem with a plethora of possibilities ranging from portals for the government sector, higher education, and more.

5 Key Benefits of Using Salesforce Communities

The idea of creating an online community might sound like a complex and extensive venture. But considering the ease of creating an online community with Salesforce and the advantages it brings to the organization, It’s a no-brainer that the Salesforce Experience Cloud is the most popular choice for building a community.

Salesforce Experience Cloud enables seamless integrations with CRM data like activities, leads, opportunities, and more. Here are 5 key benefits of utilizing Salesforce communities:

1. Provide Control to Your Users: Salesforce communities are powerful because of the strong network of users within them. With employee, customer, and partner communities in place, it encourages transparent communication and collaboration. Your users, whether they are partners, employees, or customers, get the freedom to share files, access knowledge, and seek support whenever they need it.

2. Offer Customizations as Per Needs: Along with streamlined processes, a major plus point of Salesforce communities is that these are highly customizable. The Experience Builder tool enables you to adjust facets and portal theme as per your company’s branding. You can also customize recommendations for better community engagement. Also, you get the liberty to monitor community content with access management options.

3. Create a Stellar Brand Experience: Salesforce comes with pre-built themes for community pages. Also, there are third-party providers that allow you to quickly and easily create user-friendly community experiences for your customers, partners, and employees using clicks, not code.

4. Mobile-Enabled: Another key Salesforce Community Cloud advantage is that it is mobile-ready. This means that you don’t need a separate mobile component, which lowers down additional costs. However, you might have to optimize the component with responsive designs with respect to your branding, UX, and needs.

5. Integration Friendly-Align Marketing and Sales: As with all things Salesforce, the Community Cloud offers native integration to the Salesforce system. You can also build a custom API to other backend systems to connect data in disparate systems. This enables the right users to access the right data in real-time. You get a 360-degree view of your customers to provide better service to them.

What are Salesforce Community Licenses?

Salesforce communities licenses serve as a contract between Salesforce and its customers. For the associated Salesforce product’s functionality, your Salesforce license includes metadata description of the functionality that is accessible to your organization. The license contains all relevant information, such as the start and end dates of the license or the number of users who’d have access to Salesforce.

Remember that your members still have some basic level of access even without receiving a Community license. A company has multiple licenses inclusive of all services and features.

Here’s a list of the prominent types of community licenses.

Types of Salesforce Community Licenses:

• Customer Community
• Customer Community Plus
• Partner Community
• Lightning External Apps Starter
• Lightning External Apps Plus

What Sets Salesforce Communities Apart From Other Communities?

Experience Cloud is one of the most popular and widely used clouds by Salesforce.
What sets Salesforce Community Cloud apart from these other community platforms is its remarkable integration and collaboration capabilities.

It offers personalization, customization, branding, and engagement. It is seamlessly integrated with your Salesforce system and CRM data, and has the ability to connect with most 3rd party platforms. Its mobile-friendliness and a scalable library of templates, that need no coding, offer a lot to meet your unique business needs. There are plenty of Salesforce Communities used by some of the biggest brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Walmart, and more.

Salesforce communities make it easy for you to engage with your customers, build trust, and reduce the caseload for support agents.

They are a great way to build stronger relationships with your customers that, ultimately, fast tracks the growth of your business. Whether it is about driving the bottom line, improving CSAT, or boosting employee morale – Salesforce communities are the perfect solution with seamless integrations.

Wish to Build Robust Salesforce Communities and Boost Business Value? Let’s Talk!