December, 2022 | Advanced Communities

Salesforce Experience Cloud as a Tool for Digital Transformation

Posted on December 27, 2022July 1, 2024 by Anna Babur

Technological progress is advancing at a rapid pace, impacting our lives on a professional and personal level. We are constantly seeing new and improved methods, theories, and practices developed for particular purposes with the main idea – to make our everyday life easier and better.

Although technology brings a lot of positive impact on our lives, it may also create problems that result in us struggling with things we’ve never had difficulties with before. Becoming increasingly complicated and interconnected, they capture every aspect of our lives, pushing us for progress ahead with digital transformation.

So, how do you adapt to these changes and spark innovation in your business? Keep reading to see why companies worldwide use DXP technologies, like Salesforce Experience Cloud, on their way to deep digital transformation.

Why is Salesforce a Powerful Digital Transformation Tool?

Once the ball starts rolling in the wrong direction, it’s harder to stop it. Start your digital journey with robust technology to ensure your transformation is easy and smooth – choose Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Experience Cloud is a Salesforce digital experiences platform empowered with technologies, products, and solutions that allows you to create personalized, fully-fledged sites and portals connected to your CRM data in Salesforce. Flexible, customizable, secure, and packed with excellent analytical and optimization tools, Experience Cloud is the best software for companies that are undergoing digital transformation.

Save time and effort, collaborate effectively, improve service, cut costs, become more productive, and grow sales – all with Experience Cloud and its unbelievable potential.

Explore the results of digital transformation with Salesforce Experience Cloud:

Optimized operations
Improved business processes
Enhanced communication and collaboration with partners
Upgraded productivity
Increasing efficiency
Cutting support costs
Advanced data safety
Increased sales
Exceptional customer experience.

Experience Cloud Digital Experience Platform Features and Capabilities Overview

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a powerful digital experiences platform packed with many smart features and tools to help you reach your goals, grow and scale. Let’s go over the most significant features and capabilities of Experience Cloud to see what empowers you to move faster, and reach more.

Customer 360. Experience Cloud sites are built on the Customer 360 concept; meaning your teams are provided with a single shared customer view. The Customer 360 feature helps you understand your customers and their behaviors, and deliver better experiences according to their personal needs.

Templates. Use Experience Cloud’s readymade templates to create responsive experiences that you, your customers or your partners need.

Preconfigured themes and branding capabilities. Use Experience Builder to brand your site by utilizing prebuilt themes and adjusting colors, fonts, and styles. Add readymade Lightning components or use custom solutions to enhance the functionality of your site.

Salesforce CMS. Use the power of the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to create, organize, and manage your content in one place, then publish it across all your Experience Cloud sites. Salesforce lets you connect your external CMS to post relevant content on your sites.

Knowledge. Provide your customers with an exceptional support experience by enabling a Knowledge base full of articles, FAQs, notes, documents, etc., in your Experience Cloud site.

Chatter. Add Chatter Feed to your Experience Cloud site to let members reach out to your company and get expert advice/help faster. Allow Discussion Threads so your users can reply to answers or previous replies.

Question to Case. Enable the Chatter Questions feature to let moderators create cases from questions posted in Chatter. You can also use the automation capabilities of Salesforce and set up flows in Flow Builder to automatically create cases from questions that meet specified criteria.

Groups. Enhance self-service and collaboration in your Experience Cloud site by letting your site members and guest users browse and join the groups they like. Customize your group detail page the way you prefer using separate components.

Additional functionality with AppExchange solutions. Extend functionality of your site by empowering it with third-party solutions.

Analytics, dashboards and reports. Build reports and expose their data in dashboards to see the performance of your business in various areas, and provide your customers/partners with the insights they need.

5 Ways Salesforce Experience Cloud Can Help Your Organization with Digital Transformation

Let’s dive deeper to see how Experience Cloud makes your digital transformation smooth and easy.

How Salesforce helps with digital transformation:

Data integration

Experience Cloud provides you with the unique opportunity to quickly and easily create next-generation digital experiences, integrated with your Salesforce CRM. You can also connect your data from different places, such as external CRMs or legacy sources, in one central location.

Centralized data management

Experience Cloud unites your sales, marketing, and support teams, allowing them to work within one single database. This ensures reduced data redundancy, accurate reporting, better efficiency, enhanced productivity, and seamless service. With Experience Cloud, you keep everything from all departments in one place, retaining data accuracy and accessibility across the whole organization.

Customer-centric approach and personalization

Salesforce focuses on providing a positive customer experience at every stage of the customer interaction with your organization, ensuring strong engagement with your content and the company itself. With Experience Cloud, you can control your audience’s interaction with your site and deliver only relevant information that connects your users’ interests and needs.

Personalize your Experience Cloud site with the Audience Targeting feature. Create different page variations and assign them to different audiences to meet their specific content requirements.

Automation

The future of all operations is automation. Modern businesses are first on the road to adopting new changes, and Salesforce is here to help. By providing great automation tools, Salesforce allows you to create criteria-based rules to automate your business processes and repeatable actions, saving time and resources, increasing productivity and efficiency, and reducing operating costs. Use Flow Builder to create powerful automation in Salesforce. For further automation functionality, use other Salesforce automation tools, like Approval Processes, Flow Orchestration, Process Builder, Apex, etc.

Flexibility and customization capabilities

One of the most outstanding features of Salesforce Experience Cloud is Experience Builder. Its unlimited flexibility and full customization capabilities allow you to create custom sites aligned with your brand identity. You control the appearance of your site by choosing and changing page layouts, customizing or changing prebuilt themes, adjusting colors and fonts, uploading images (company logo, header image, etc.), or configuring additional theme settings when needed.

Best Practices and Tips to Using Experience Cloud for Digital Transformation

We’ve prepared a list of tips and best practices for using Salesforce DXP Experience Cloud for digital transformation.

Build a site aligned with your needs

Use the SFDC Experience Cloud platform to create beautiful, fully-fledged sites in accordance with your business needs.

Use Experience Cloud to create PRM (Partner Relationship Management) and support portals, B2B commerce sites, member or volunteer portals, sites for fundraising and charities, microsites, help centers, and many more…

Enable Knowledge base in your Experience Cloud site

Salesforce provides users with an excellent system for storing and managing documentation, keeping all critical information accessible to website visitors, clients, partners, and service agents when and where it’s needed. Fill your Salesforce Knowledge base with helpful articles, FAQs, documents, guides or other valuable information to enhance self-service on your site, increase agent productivity and cut costs on support. However, the Salesforce Knowledge base’s out-of-the-box functionality is quite limited for Experience Cloud. With our comprehensive Salesforce knowledge management solution, AC Knowledge Management Enterprise, empower your Knowledge base with enhanced functionality to solve any business challenges.

Integrate third-party solutions and components

Enhance your Experience Cloud functionality to deliver better customer experiences in Salesforce and meet your specific business needs. Use Salesforce PRM solutions to take your partner management to the next level. As one of the leading app providers on AppExchange, Advanced Communities delivers impactful native to Salesforce, built directly on Force.com, solutions for Experience Cloud sites. Gather insights and feedback on your products and services from site users, prioritize them, and put the ideas with the most impact into the development roadmap with our Salesforce ideas management app, AC Ideas Ultimate. Use the AC MemberSmart app to integrate Salesforce for associations and member organizations. Visit our site to find many more comprehensive solutions.

Enable Google Analytics

Take advantage of Google Analytics and track site traffic, user types, user IDs, average time spent, and search activity on your Experience Cloud site. Enable Google Analytics to get deeper insights into customer search behavior on your site and improve marketing ROI. Pull received data to create reports and provide your team with important information, and updates.

Turn on Google’s IP Anonymization or configure other additional settings when required.

Take advantage of the Salesforce CMS

Salesforce provides you with the unique opportunity to create, update, organize, manage, and deliver your content to the world from one centralized location – Salesforce CMS. As a hybrid CMS, it allows you to extend your content across all channels, inside and outside of Salesforce, to target different audiences and deliver the right information to the right people, at the right time – all without code!

Note!

The powerful and flexible Salesforce CMS became free without any restrictions! Get details.

Use Mobile Publisher

Create a fully branded mobile app of your Salesforce Experience Cloud site with Salesforce Mobile Publisher, and get it published in Google Play or Apple Store by Salesforce. You can now build both enterprise-grade and consumer-grade secure mobile apps for iPad, along with the iPhone, and have the ability to lock the orientation to landscape or portrait. Salesforce Mobile Publisher is empowered with a bunch of other cool features to help you create branded apps totally aligned with your business needs.

We want to help you!

When you need a hand with Salesforce Experience Cloud integration or configuration, you are very welcome to reach out! The Advanced Communities team of experts is trusted by all major Salesforce partners. Thousands of happy customers are here to make your experience with Salesforce and its solutions as seamless, effective, and exciting as possible.

Contact us for more information on our products and services, or book a demo of our Salesforce-native components to see how they help businesses succeed.

CustomEyes Book Store for Guide Dogs

Posted on December 22, 2022December 15, 2023 by Julia Yerikova

Dear friends,

In this post, we’d like to tell you more about the project we’ve done for Guide Dogs. Keep reading to learn more details and how Guide Dogs benefits from implementing the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform for the mission they do.

What Do Guide Dogs Do

Guide Dogs provides a range of services to support people with visual impairment, equipping them with the skills they need to lead an active and independent life.

Children can have sight problems too but having a vision impairment shouldn’t stop them from knowing the joy of reading. That’s why with CustomEyes Books, they want to give children the chance to read a real book, just like every other child, for the same cost as every other child. This not only helps them keep up at school but also means they can share books with friends.

CustomEyes Books has over 4,200 large print books available. Each one is custom made, with font size, spacing, color and more all tailored to each child’s individual needs.

The Challenges Guide Dogs Faced

The process to order a book was very slow and tedious with the customer needing to sift through many libraries of PDF pages to see what titles were available. Quite often, they would just call support to save time in their search, which was time consuming for the team. PDF form Orders would then be placed by email or by post with the risk of getting lost and ultimately not being processed. Generating a lot of frustration on both sides.

Guide Dogs knew they had to digitalize the overall process to provide a better customer experience and streamline operations. To create an online bookstore for members to easily search, browse the thousands of titles available to them, place their order and ultimately pay online. Guide Dogs wanted customers to be able to choose and customize book recommendations based on a child’s eyesight parameters, and then save those custom preferences in their customer profile to make ordering more books easy in the future. Salesforce Experience Cloud was the perfect fit to achieve their goals.

Solution Provided by Advanced Communities

The customer-facing side of Experience Cloud allowed CustomEyes to present the information they hold in their core systems, like book titles and customer information, directly to customers, allowing centralized customer information.

To make the distribution of CustomEyes large print books easier and more flexible, Advanced Communities provided Guide Dogs with the AC eCommerce component for launching an easy-to-use online store on their existing website. Some personalization was made to meet the client’s specific needs.

Benefits and Results

The feedback has been great, from customers who have found the shop easy to use, to the production team who now get notified of orders instantly. CustomEyes can now respond quickly to customer feedback and effectively improve the entire system with this end-to-end service. The production team has control over what books are available, and can add members quickly and easily to the store via a welcome email with a link to create their store login. They can even leverage dynamic content display!

Guide Dogs’ mission is simple: to help people with visual impairment live the life they choose. Offering visually-impaired children more choices through services like CustomEyes may seem like a small thing to most, but to a child learning to read it’s everything and a stronger digital infrastructure enables Guide Dogs to deliver these life-changing tools to the children who need them most.

Customers have a much better journey with not just less but more simplified steps, as well as full visibility on their orders status.

Beyond the improved functionality and ease of use, the data speaks for itself:

From 2018 to 2020, the average order monthly growth was 61%. Since implementing the solution it has more than doubled with 135%.

The number of books per order has also increased.
Furthermore, the donations are growing as well; 23% of the orders include a donation between 1 and 15 points.

Watch the video to see what was implemented:

Conclusion

Advanced Communities are proud to be a part of such a good initiative. We are always happy to use our skills and expertise to improve your experience, digitalize processes and create a good-looking, easy-to-use site for your customers. Contact us for help with Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation or configuration.

Why Should You Move Your Data to Salesforce from Other CRM Platforms?

Posted on December 9, 2022July 16, 2024 by Anna Babur

Technological progress and active digital transformation make modern companies look for innovative ways to organize their business operations, automate repetitive processes, and strengthen their web presence.

It’s now time to upgrade from obsolete technologies to newer and innovative ones. Keep reading to learn about the benefits of migrating to Salesforce and get tips on making your jump successful.

What is Salesforce CRM?

Salesforce is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It is packed with smart optimizing features and marketing automation solutions to help improve your business processes, sell smarter, grow faster, and provide exceptional customer service.

Uniting marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service tools under one roof, Salesforce is becoming the best product for companies looking for a comprehensive cloud-based solution to run their business. It’s full of outstanding CRM features, like content management, automation tools, analytics, sales and service management solutions, collaboration and customer engagement tools, and many more…

Why Do More and More Businesses Switch to Salesforce?

Every year, the number of companies migrating away from premise-based systems onto Salesforce.com is constantly growing. Today, Salesforce is widely adopted by organizations of different sizes and industries. Providing enhanced features that accelerate growth, SFDC is great for big and small to mid-sized companies.

Millions worldwide use Salesforce to manage interactions with existing and potential customers, connect and collaborate with partners, build smart marketing and sales strategies, enhance client management, as well as learn and generate growth. Extremely popular among membership organizations and non-profits, it is also used for fundraising, charities, and volunteer management in Salesforce. Learn more about using Salesforce for non-profit organizations in our article.

7 Reasons Why You Should Consider Migration to Salesforce CRM

Why choose Salesforce? If you’re asking, you probably need more than your current CRM system and are looking for something new, innovative, and packed with smart features to help you grow and scale faster. This is where Salesforce comes in.

Salesforce has completely changed the idea of the traditional CRM system. It merged all the features of a traditional CRM with a bunch of new unique tools and capabilities, offering its users much more than ever before.

Salesforce is your best choice if you’re looking for:

Flexibility. As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce allows its users to work from anywhere, anytime, and on any device with an internet connection.
Data centralization. Built on the Customer 360 concept, Salesforce gathers customer data from every step of their journey into a single database. Having a holistic view of each user and their history with your organization, you will better understand them, their needs, and their preferences to deliver the service they love.
Automation. Salesforce offers a bunch of automation tools to save time and resources. Use Approvals, Process Builder, Workflow, and other tools to automate repetitive processes, optimize workload and boost productivity.
Seamless integration. Enhance the capabilities of your Salesforce by using ready third-party apps from AppExchange. These solutions are specifically designed to work in Salesforce, ensuring smooth performance, seamless automated instant data synchronization, and enhanced security.
Enhanced productivity. Salesforce offers all the necessary tools to eliminate manual data entry, automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, making the sales pipeline more efficient, enhancing collaboration between departments, and ensuring sales rep productivity.
Sophisticated cloud infrastructure. As a Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) solution, Salesforce offers an excellent cloud-based infrastructure for users and developers to do their job effectively.
Enhanced security. When talking about safety, no one place is better protected than Salesforce. It utilizes the best security technologies ensuring enhanced protection of your data.

10 Useful Tips on Salesforce Data Migration

If you’re about to start your data migration process in Salesforce, you may have wondered how to carry out this complicated and responsible process. How do you move thousands of users and millions of posts, reputation points, likes, followers, hashtags, comments, groups, images and files you have accumulated over the years?

We’ve created a collection of best practices, solutions and tips so you can avoid crucial and costly mistakes when implementing your Salesforce data migration strategy, making your transition as smooth and simple as possible.

The preparation process. Thorough and comprehensive planning is crucial to ensuring a successful rollout. The starting point of your Salesforce implementation journey should be analyzing your day-to-day business processes to shape your goals and define progress expectations. Remember to evaluate possible risks and weak points. It’s always a good idea to perform SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to develop strategic planning for the future.
The best implementation strategy for your business. At this point, it’s necessary to choose the best implementation strategy and define clear Salesforce data migration steps, taking into account your specific business needs. It helps to choose the right Salesforce data migration tool, such as Data Loader which can move up to 5 million records. We recommend you contact us if you need to load more than 5 million records.
Data migration plan with a completion timeline. A migration plan with a particular completion timeline facilitates the execution of a strategic plan, helps organize the work that needs to be done, and helps determine when to complete your transfer to Salesforce. Follow your plan and timeline, but be bold and adjust it when needed.
Prepare your CRM data for migration. Evaluate your data and define what you want to move to Salesforce. We suggest migrating only essential data and not spending time and resources on moving data that has not been used in the past, nor would be used in the future. Make sure you back up cleaned data before transferring it to keep it safe in case something goes wrong.
Data implementation workbook. This document aims to provide detailed guidance for data import in Salesforce. Add every step to take to ensure nothing is forgotten or left behind during the migration.
Data accuracy testing after migration. No matter how smooth the migration goes, it’s always a good idea to perform a post-migration check. Pay special attention to data loss, duplicates, data corruption, or semantics errors.
Error documentation. Make sure you document all the errors that occur while transferring data from your legacy system to Salesforce. Having them at your fingertips helps you to react quickly to avoid big problems after the migration is completed.
User adoption. Prepare your team to work in a new environment. Ensure they are willing and comfortable with the new system. Note that Salesforce offers a great platform for learning – Trailhead. By completing trails, your team will become more confident with the system and the tools it offers to adapt easily to changes.
Complaints from internal users. Lack of adoption and knowledge can turn into a costly undertaking. Listen to your team members and support them in overcoming the problems and difficulties when adapting the system.
Leave it to the professionals. Let our experts carry out the implementation process for you for seamless, painless Salesforce integration. We can handle any common migration issues that arise when moving from your legacy system. Advanced Communities is here to help you get through the migration process without stress. Please contact us for additional information.

How can Advanced Communities Help?

Advanced Communities is a team of experts specializing in building engaging experiences on Salesforce, providing consulting services, and delivering comprehensive solutions for your Experience Cloud sites.

We’ve accumulated years of experience moving our clients’ data to Salesforce and are happy to help you with Salesforce implementation or Salesforce data migration services. Feel free to reach out and book a full demo of our components, or ask for a professional Salesforce implementation consultation.