Read in this article:

• What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?
• What is a Salesforce Community created with Experience Cloud?
• 7 benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud
• Top Salesforce Experience Cloud features for customers
• Top Salesforce Experience Cloud features for admins and managers
• How can the Salesforce Experience Cloud help your business?

Salesforce Experience Cloud Features: How to build a thriving community with Salesforce

Salesforce Community Cloud has been renamed Experience Cloud with the latest Winter 21 Release, reflecting the fact that it is a platform that allows you to create not only a community, but also differently branded experiences such as online shops, portals, mobile apps, help centers, forums, and websites with CMS systems, B2B commerce. 

Salesforce Experience Cloud opens up a world of opportunities and variations on ways to use it and what your partners, customers or employees’ digital experience could look like.

In this article, we will focus on great features that will improve your business and provide a secure and comfortable environment for your partners, customers or employees.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

You might have already heard Experience Cloud named as a partner portal, support site, customer community or Salesforce community. In fact, it’s a software platform (DXP) connected to your Salesforce CRM and created to deliver beautiful digital experiences personalized to your customers and partners. Simply put, it’s just a website with an integrated set of technologies, digital marketing products, services and solutions for effective connection and collaboration with your partners and customers.

Since Experience Cloud lives in Salesforce, it serves as the window into your Salesforce org. All of the data shared and shown on your website is saved within Salesforce and is securely safeguarded by the system.     

Experience Cloud unites all Salesforce applications and functionality under one roof: sales, marketing, and customer support covering a wide range of areas from analytics to advertising and content management. You don’t have to be a big company or a particular business to use an innovative Experience Cloud platform. As a small or mid-sized enterprise, you can quickly and easily create maintainable and beautifully branded Salesforce digital experiences according to your needs. You don’t even need to be a coder or have special know-how in the IT industry. Using experience templates, you can build adaptive and compelling CRM-powered sites that create branded areas for customers and partners. 

What is a Salesforce Community created with Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Community is a digital experience that connects customers, partners and employees and ensures complete access to all the information about the company, its products or services. It can be a branded website, information-sharing portal, forum or a mobile app that lives in the Salesforce org and is tailored to a particular group of community members.

With Experience Cloud, you can create various Salesforce communities that complete different tasks and achieve multiple goals.

Key types of experiences built with Experience Cloud:

• Customer community. It’s a B2C digital cloud-based space designed to share relevant information and enhance interaction between customers, experts, partners, etc. It’s the place where users can connect with each other to discuss a product, service or marketplace, post reviews, find answers to questions they may have, and also find documentation about the products and manage their cases. A Customer Community is a kind of self-help customer support that serves for better interaction and ensures strong audience engagement. 
• Partner collaboration community (PRM). Partner Community is an ecosystem around Salesforce that ensures more effective collaboration and management as well as accurate analytics and sales growth. It’s used for partner co-selling, deal registration, partner marketing resources sharing, and marketing development fund management. With PRM, you provide your partners with all the necessary tools to make your business boom.
• Customer service center. It’s a cloud-based portal that serves as a support center for customers. It’s where users can ask for help, solve their problems and look for the best solutions when needed.
• Help center. It’s a self-service support site designed to provide the users with the information they may need. By creating a Salesforce-based help center, you build the space where your users can find answers to their questions or contact you if the answer is not available by submitting a support request right in the help center. 

You can have up to 100 Experience Cloud sites on your Salesforce org. However, once you need to use specific templates or functionality, you need to buy a community license based on your business needs. You can choose from Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, Channel Account or External Apps. Each of these licenses configures data differently and allows you to set all the permissions according to the goals you defined from a business perspective. 

7 benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud

Creating Salesforce communities with the Salesforce Experience Cloud is an excellent choice to use in your company, and in this part of the article, we’ll tell you why. 

Benefits of using Experience Cloud for your business:

A wide variety of Experience Cloud solutions. 

You can create various experiences with no coding necessary in accordance with your business needs and goals. With Experience Cloud, you can build, customize and maintain different communities specifically tailored to your community members.

More effective business management. 

You can easily extend business processes to partners and customers and thus strengthen sales, boost new customer acquisitions, and increase revenue. 

Total flexibility and easy customization. 

You can create branded, feature-rich and user-friendly communities by using Builder layouts and templates, themes, standard and custom components, as well as personalization options.

Powerful branding. 

Experience Cloud provides maximum flexibility in customizing your community. You can easily create a branded space and reflect your company identity by using Experience Builder functionality.

Third-party app integration. 

You can integrate data from third-party providers to enhance your experience functionality in order to meet specific businesses’ needs.

Efficient content management within Salesforce. 

Create, manage and deliver content to any of your Experience Cloud sites by using Salesforce CMS. Keep your customers always engaged with your updated content.

Advanced security. 

You always control data visibility and audience access. All your company’s documentation and specific data are securely stored and protected from unauthorized access.

Top Salesforce Experience Cloud features for customers

What’s so special about Salesforce Experience Cloud? Let’s go over its most cool features for end-users: 

• The power of Experience Builder. With its customizable pre-built templates, out-of-the-box functionality, and packaged applications, Experience Builder ensures easy and fast creation, customization and implementation of beautiful communities that match your company’s brand style and standards.

• Third-party app integration is one more cool feature that serves for community functionality enhancements. You can empower your community with various feature-rich third-party applications available on AppExchange. For example, AC Events Enterprise, AC MemberSmart, AC Ideas Ultimate, AC eCommerce, and AC Knowledge Management Enterprise will definitely take your business to the next level. 
• Customer 360 concept. Experience Cloud is based on the Customer 360 concept, which enables the creation of customer profiles with a unified collection of customer data available to various company departments and offices when needed. It helps you offer and deliver personalized Salesforce experiences your customers expect, build efficient engagement strategies, and make better forecasts and predictions.
• Channel sales boost. With Experience Cloud, you can also increase sales by directly connecting with your business partners (distributors, resellers, etc.) and giving them access to all the company information they need to work effectively.

• Mobile-friendliness. Mobile-friendly sites increase customer satisfaction and thus keep them engaged with your company. If you want to ensure a better user experience and improve customer retention, then the Experience Cloud community site is your best choice.
• Time-saving & decreased support costs. By creating a community, you provide your users with a simple self-service where they can find answers to their questions and search for solutions to their problems. It means more time for you to focus on management processes. 
• Analytics all in one place. Salesforce provides you with the opportunity to create accurate reports and dashboards to track business progress. You can also share analytics information through the community, so your partners see what’s happening in the business. 

• Efficient collaborative workflow. Experience Cloud community helps you connect your customers, partners and employees with each other and provide them with all they need to get their work done in time.
• Controlled level of privacy. You always control your data visibility and audience access. Since all your data is stored on the Salesforce org, it’s reliably protected from leaks and break-ins. You can securely share the data whenever you need it.

Top Salesforce Experience Cloud features for admins and managers

Experience Cloud site managers and admins work hand-in-hand to protect, engage, and measure the site’s success. Sometimes they complete similar or even the same tasks, but each provides a unique contribution to the site operation. So, let’s see what Salesforce Experience Cloud features help admins and managers carry out their work on the highest level.   

• Easy setup and implementation. One of the most valuable features of Experience Cloud is its rich configuration potential and simple drag and drop functionality so that everyone can build Salesforce websites easily with no special knowledge in IT. 
• No code building. You don’t need to be a coder or a developer to build beautiful and powerful Experience Cloud communities and apps.

• Experience Cloud sites are Salesforce native. It means that all data is stored inside Salesforce and is never processed by 3rd party servers. So you as an admin or manager don’t need to implement additional integrations with Salesforce to access data since all the data is already inside the Salesforce. Besides, it ensures advanced security protecting company information from leaks and unauthorized access.
• AppExchange enhancements. If you are looking for ways to empower customers’ experiences, you can do it with configurable apps and components available on AppExchange. Here you can find, download and install various software apps to meet specific needs.
• SEO & Tracking. Salesforce provides out-of-the-box integration with Google Analytics so you can track the usage of your sites, including the number of visits, number of page views, average time spent on site, etc. It also allows you to manage search engine optimization by defining what information can be indexed by external services and discovered through online searches. 

• You can have 100 active, inactive or preview Experience Cloud sites on one org. Create different communities using the same functionality without switching to other orgs or systems.     
• Unlimited flexibility and full customization. By using no-code, low-code, and pro-code tools, you can build, design, automate and modify custom components, apps and processes, ensuring the best experiences for your users. 
• Audiences & Personalization. Personalization is an Experience Cloud feature that allows you to work with your audiences, controlling their interaction with your website content according to your company’s needs and goals. For instance, you decide what information to display to a particular audience in a particular region.

How can the Salesforce Experience Cloud help your business?

Experience Cloud, together with its digital experiences, gives an excellent opportunity to connect with customers in a new way as well as share information and collaborate on business processes easily and more efficiently. It’s a next-generation system created to drive more sales, marketing, and income. 

If you are looking for ways to build your Experience Cloud powerful feature-rich CRM digital experiences faster than ever, then take advantage of our comprehensive ready-made solutions. Advanced Communities is a team of Community and Service Cloud experts specializing in Salesforce Experience Cloud customization, development and consulting. We create products and components that provide powerful, additional functionality to the features available out of the box with the Community Cloud. Hence, we empower your community, make your sales rolling, and take your business to the next level. Join thousands of users that power their communities with Advanced Communities Cloud products!

If you are thinking about implementing Community Cloud in Salesforce and creating a branded community or upgrading the existing one, please get in touch with our Community and Service Cloud experts to get professional expert assistance.