The Evolution of Salesforce Community Cloud

Salesforce Community is the evolution of portal technology, offering a new and more contemporary user experience, combined with a system of engagement and intelligence.

HOW IT ALL STARTED:

2010 – Chatter launched: a new concept for effective collaboration on business processes.

2013 – Communities launched.

2014 – Community Cloud: communities became important, with more people involved in research, with more dedicated developers, marketers and sellers.

2015 – Lightning experience.

2016 – Lightning Bolt and custom templates for customer, partner and employee communities.

WHAT WE HAVE TODAY:

7,500+ Activated communities with 55M members.

So, what are the technologies that today’s customers are facing?

Websites: well branded and open, but there is no personalisation or interaction.

Portals: they are connected to business data, but not mobile or personalised.

Social Communities (like Jive, Lithium or even Facebook): there are interactive discussions, but they are not connected to business processes with customer integration.

Salesforce Communities combine all the above benefits and:

  1. The application has URL, internal/external users, multi-device support and it SUPPORTS business processes.
  2. Establishing a Salesforce Community means you have to have business processes.
  3. It has tools for collaboration – Knowledge, Q&A, Chatter and document storage.
  4. You get secure data access – core metadata platform for all cloud products with high-level security.

So why are communities successful? Because when you have a community, you have a system of records, engagement and intelligence in one place. You can and you should use it for your business partners, employees and customers.

How Salesforce Einstein Will Influence Experience Cloud

AI is here and it transforms the way we interact with technology and with each other. Still, many people do not realise how close AI is – in fact, it is a part of everyday life for many people. This is because the best AI is always invisible to its users.

AI works every time you ask Siri about something, or every time you search for items on eBay or Amazon. AI guides you to the best search results by the easiest path. When you see a list of suggested items based on what you have seen previously, it is also a result of AI work.

AI makes everything much easier. If it works well, we can see our favourite products on the top of the list, or movies we are likely to watch, or the most interesting people on social media based on our friends list.

Einstein is AI that will simplify Salesforce business processes. Einstein for Experience Cloud means that users will receive:

  • Recommended experts, Q&A, articles and topics related to customers’ interests
  • Automated service escalation, if immediate attention is needed
  • Newsfeed insights (tailoring content and highlighting the most relevant topics or questions)

Put simply, Einstein will provide customers with the best information faster than ever before and with a personalised customer experience.

Dreamforce 2016. Highlights.

This year’s Dreamforce conference was just spectacular! It was rich in announcements, breakout sessions, hands-on training, keynote speakers, networking etc. Here are the top three things about Dreamforce ‘16 from Salesforce:

Salesforce Artificial Intelligence – Einstein

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a complex and highly technical solution that makes a lot of interesting things happen every day. We use it to work faster, to be more productive and to be smarter in our everyday actions. Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of machine learning and deep learning, as well as of natural language processing.

AI requires time and qualified technical staff to be leveraged in enterprise applications. Salesforce Einstein removes complexity and enables companies to deliver customer experience in a smarter and more personalised way. It is a set of built-in platform services that are designed to provide advanced AI capabilities in your CRM. Einstein will learn and get smarter with every interaction. Every piece of data will be used to serve your customers in a smarter way.

Read how Salesforce Einstein works in Community Cloud here.

Community Cloud Lightning Bolt

We have a blog post about Lightning Bolt for Community Cloud, but let’s summarise what we know about it. Lightning Bolt is a set of predefined community templates for specific business sectors, like banking, retail, healthcare and sales. It is a project that is common to Salesforce and its biggest partner companies. With Lightning Bolt, you can choose your community template from the list of templates created by Salesforce partners.

More Lightning Experience!

Lightning Experience is slowly, but surely, overtaking the classic interface. More functionality, more features and a more advanced UI – it’s mobile adopted, clean and friendly. Now with the ‘classic’ style top menu, it is even easier to work with in the system.