January, 2023 | Advanced Communities

How Can Salesforce Experience Cloud Help You to Grow Your Business?

Posted on January 18, 2023May 15, 2023 by Julia Yerikova

For all businesses, there is often a moment in their development process when they reach a certain point and get stuck. This very moment can be crucial for business growth. If you are decisive enough to turn this stagnation into something bigger and more powerful. It’s time for fresh ideas as well as new approaches, or directions.

One of the most effective ways to transform your business and take it to another level is digitalization. This helps in optimizing all work processes, creating a modern, handy environment for communication with partners, as well as significantly improving your customers’ experience. At this point, Salesforce Experience Cloud becomes invaluable.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud All About?

Experience Cloud is a part of the Salesforce platform that allows you to create various digital experiences without code. What kind of experiences can you create?

Basically, all you need, such as a partner, member, volunteer, or student portal, an online store, a customer community, a help center, and many other variations specific to your organization, which can be done in Experience Cloud on the Salesforce platform.

It’s like a site builder with a bunch of different templates, page layouts, and prebuilt components. So, it’s easy to pick the right template for your business, find the appropriate components, then drag-and-drop them to the page according to your preferences.

Why Salesforce Experience Cloud Might Be a Perfect Cloud Platform for Your Business?

The Salesforce platform gives you many more possibilities in comparison to other CRM systems. Its functionality is much wider in scope than just storing data about your customers, their orders, or support cases. Let’s see some of its benefits in more detail.

Branding

With Experience Cloud, you can create a branded site for any purpose. It’s very flexible, allowing you to implement any design according to your company branding, add different pages with news, events, groups, articles, etc., and place components on the page as you want with only a few clicks.

All Data in One Place

All data about your partners and clients are stored directly in Salesforce so you can easily access it at any time, when needed, keeping things in order. Furthermore, all information collected from your site (for example data that users enter in forms on your site ), is also stored inside Salesforce.

Personalization

One of the most outstanding Experience Cloud benefits is personalization. You can set up a system where a personalized site view will be displayed to each group of users. How is this possible?

By dividing all of your users into groups based on any criteria (location, role, partner status, etc.), you then build different page layouts for each of them and set up which group will see what page using the personalization feature.

Security

Salesforce provides world-class security so you don’t need to worry about your important data being stolen. Only authorized users have access to the information.

Also, thanks to the built-in security settings (permission sets, sharing rules, profiles), share with users only the information relevant to them and hide fields they shouldn’t see.

Experience Cloud Features & Capabilities

With Experience Cloud, build communications with whether customers, partners, members, or employees. Salesforce provides a wide range of functionality within its own components (Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc.) which are easily integrated with any other third-party solution to supply your users with all the information and features they need.

One more great thing about Experience Cloud is being able to improve your content performance using Salesforce CMS (Content Management System), which recently became absolutely free. So, now you can manage your content creation, planning, and delivery in one place with no need to pay any extra money. Distribute valuable content across different channels easily using all the advantages of this comprehensive tool.

Experience Cloud helps create a friendly environment for communication between customers using its built-in Chatter and Groups functionality. People can create discussions in Chatter, join groups according to their interests, as well as discuss products and services – all possibilities for successful customer interaction provided out of the box.

What is an Experience Cloud Site and What Can You Do With It?

As mentioned, with Experience Cloud you can build Experience Sites of any complexity, form, design, and content. Experience Builder is a tool that lets you select themes, colors, and fonts, create and delete pages, place components on pages, and make other customizations. Here are some examples of the kind of sites you can create.

Membership Portal

Space where membership organizations can place all membership information, such as events, news, a page for member fees, job openings, etc. All members can have their own profile with contact information or other details, and find other members within the member directory.

Support Portal

Create a site where customers will find the solution to issues they face by themselves. Build a knowledge base with answers to FAQs, how-to articles, or other educational content. This will free up valuable time for your support team as the number of cases created by users decreases.

Partner Portal

Building a portal for collaboration with partners helps to boost sales and improve your partner network. With Salesforce PRM, establish an onboarding process, easily find the right partner, share marketing assets, and much more.

5 Ways Salesforce Experience Cloud Will Help You Grow Your Business

1. Increase Customer Engagement

With Experience Cloud, create a place where customers want to return again and again. With an interactive customer portal, make them feel like they are a part of the creation and decision-making process.

Involve them in the ideation stage and encourage them to come up with ideas on how to make your products or services better. Set up a reward system that awards points for comments, votes, ideas, or feedback – a leaderboard will display the most active users and their score.

2. Boost Sales

Enhance your organization’s sales with eCommerce integration, an exciting way to sell your products or services right on your Experience Cloud site. Using this functionality, make it very easy for customers to navigate, select and buy your products. It is also handy for your employees to collect and proceed with orders.

3. Automation for Scaling

With Salesforce, automate almost all the time-consuming processes. By automating manual tasks, you can significantly increase the number of cases you handle, and orders you proceed with.

Also, Experience Cloud helps you to manage events and simplify the registration process, track resources you offer for rent, streamline hiring processes, and many other aspects, depending on your business specific.

4. Analytics & Reports

Salesforce provides a bunch of different reports and dashboards, allowing you to keep track of all the important indicators and clearly seeing the full picture.

Real-time metrics are very helpful in making the right decisions at the right time, which is crucial for consistent growth.

5. Flexible Design

In the modern world, the number of things we do on-the-go is growing every day. If your business isn’t digitized enough to be accessible by your users, wherever they are, your services might be in less demand.

That is why it’s so important for every growing company to adapt to today’s reality. All digital experiences in Salesforce’s Experience Cloud are fully mobile optimized, allowing users to access your site, even on the road, via any device.

Hire a Salesforce Experience Cloud Consultant to improve your digital strategy

Our company specializes in Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation and configuration. We also have a list of our custom components to help you extend the standard Salesforce functionality.
We are experienced in building communities for companies of different sizes and industries. At Advanced Communities, our Salesforce Experience Cloud experts are always happy to help. Contact us if you have any questions or to book a demo!

Building Sites Without Code: The Power of Experience Builder in the Salesforce Experience Cloud

Posted on January 17, 2023October 9, 2023 by Anna Babur

No-code and low-code development approaches have been skyrocketing recently, allowing most modern companies with no dedicated development team to create the sites and apps they require to conduct their business.

This approach implies using no-code platforms empowered with tools for easy, fast software development. As a great alternative to traditional development, these platforms help non-technical people create sites of all types that are equally, and sometimes even better, than their coded versions. Salesforce Experience Cloud is one of those mind-blowing no-code solutions that takes the software creation process to the next level.

Keep reading to learn more about Salesforce Experience Cloud and how to use its powerful drag-and-drop no-code development tool, Experience Builder, to deliver personalized experiences.

What is Salesforce Experience Builder?

Salesforce is no more than just a CRM system. But by uniting powerful tools and cloud technologies, it can help you better connect and collaborate with customers and partners, grow your business, raise productivity, and boost revenue.

Salesforce provides a set of cloud-based resources so you can build your own applications and websites easily, cheaply, and fast. This is where Salesforce Experience Cloud comes in. Experience Cloud allows you to create branded sites connected to your CRM without writing code, thereby addressing different purposes and achieving multiple online objectives. Eliminate worries about which infrastructure, operating systems, or development and deployment tools to use. With Experience Cloud, you have everything you need under one roof.

Salesforce Experience Builder is a no-code development tool that provides ready-to-use drag-and-drop functionality to develop and customize powerful CRM-driven websites fast, and with very low setup costs. The tool has been designed and developed as part of the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform.

The main capabilities of the Experience Builder website creator are:

Flexible customization
Easy styling
Empowering with pre-built or custom Lightning components
Different audience targeting and personalization
Automating
Enhanced security and data protection
… and many more.

Main Reasons to Use Salesforce Experience Builder on Experience Cloud

Building a site is often about complex software stacks, complicated hardware maintenance, frequent updates, balancing aesthetics with functionality and speed, and investing a lot of money in app development… Salesforce Experience Cloud covers all this for you. Widely adopted by organizations of different sizes and industries, it’s the best solution in terms of time, effectiveness and money.

Main reasons why you should create a Salesforce community with Experience Builder:

No code. With Experience Builder, build beautiful, feature-rich, and easy-navigate Salesforce Builder sites using intuitive ready-to-use, drag-anddrop options without any coding knowledge. When customizing a site with Experience Builder, you see what you’re building in real-time and can make instant changes when needed.

Easy configuration and setup. As development tools, servers and programming environments are readily accessible via the cloud, site creation has become nothing but a cakewalk. Take advantage of wide Experience Builder customization capabilities to build branded sites for various purposes that captivate audiences, and increase user involvement.

Low-cost maintenance and updating. To create and maintain an Experience Cloud site, you need only one person, not a whole team. Deploying changes and updates within Experience Cloud is much faster than previously thought possible. If you decide to change your target market, change access permissions, add site languages or something else, you can do so without engaging the developers, all inside Experience Builder.

Configurable accessibility. Manage the security and privacy settings of your site right inside Experience Builder. Use the Administration panel to take care of administrative tasks, such as adding members, securing your data, configuring email notifications, enabling reputation, determining data visibility, sharing opportunities, as well as accessing content, objects, and records in your site, and so forth.
Integration. The Salesforce Lightning community built within Experience Builder integrates with your Salesforce CRM. Thus, you don’t need to worry about external platforms, additional setup, or third-party data storage. Integrate information and Salesforce data into your site, such as orders, cases or financial information, from any source and extend the data to different users – customers or partners – when needed.

Salesforce Experience Builder on Experience Cloud – Key Features

Salesforce Experience Builder is enriched with various features that makes building a drag-and-drop site a breeze for users without coding skills.

Let’s go over the most important and useful ones:

Flexible customization

You can create and modify your site pages, even adjusting the page structure if necessary. It’s easy to customize each component on the page using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Effortless branding

Tailor your site to your exact preferences. Take advantage of pre-designed themes, fine-tune colors and fonts, add images, and sculpt the page layout to match your brand’s identity. Branding sets allow you to personalize your websites for specific target audiences.

Custom components integration

Enhance your site’s functionality effortlessly by incorporating drag-and-drop components from the Components panel of Experience Builder. You can customize these components directly on the canvas without having to leave the Experience Builder interface. Visit AppExchange to discover solutions which are a best fit for your company, making your business processes more efficient and your teams more productive. For example, utilize the powerful Salesforce event management application, AC Events Enterprise, in your Experience Builder event microsite to plan, organize and manage events of all types and complexity. Or enhance self-service with AC Knowledge Management Enterprise to help your customers find the answers they are looking for, and resolve issues faster than ever before.

Personalized content

Create unique experiences for different audiences by setting up audience targeting. This ensures that your content speaks directly to specific groups of people, delivering a tailored experience.

Multilingual support

Experience Builder lets you create multilingual sites to serve separate international audiences. You don’t need to create separate sites for each language. All languages are maintained within one site, making it easy to switch between them without having to leave the site page when previewing or editing page content. In addition, let users translate individual questions, posts, comments, answers, and replies in Feeds. Export site content for translation then import it back into the site, if needed. Use Experience Builder settings to add site languages and manage their settings.

Mobile Publisher

The Mobile Publisher feature allows those without coding knowledge to develop mobile applications for Experience Cloud sites that work well on the range of devices in use. You don’t need to hire anyone from outside the company to adapt your site for mobiles or list it in Google Play and the App Store. With Salesforce Mobile Publisher, app creation and distribution is easy, fast and cheap.

CMS

The Salesforce CMS provides you with a unique opportunity to create and manage content in one place, and distribute it across various channels, including Experience Builder sites. Personalize your content using audience settings, organize it into collections, flag it with topics, and connect your external CMS to your Builder site to save time in migrating from one CMS to another.

Note!

Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) is now a free application for Experience Cloud. That means every Salesforce user has access to the full CMS functionality without any limitations! Read more in our article.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Drive traffic to your website by making it visible to search engines. Experience Builder allows you to set up SEO for your public site and lets search engines index all your public pages. Improve search results by configuring SEO settings, such as title and description properties, and by entering specific head tags for your site pages.

Please note: SEO features are supported on production orgs only.

Google Analytics

Experience Builder sites are integrated with Google Analytics, allowing you to track the usage of your sites, including user types and IDs, number of visits, number of page views, average time spent on the site, search activity, etc. Use received data to create the reports and build all-in-one informative dashboards to keep your team members up-to-date with progress metrics.

Experience Builder is empowered with a bunch of other cool features, like gamification and reputation levels, automated email notifications, login and registration settings, moderation rules, dashboards, and many more… But more on this in our next articles.

Want Us to Help?

At Advanced Communities, we build solutions that help our customers overcome their business challenges and find success. How do we do it? We put customer satisfaction at the very heart of what we do! Our teams work together to deliver the best Salesforce-native solutions that are just the right size for your specific needs. Utilizing years of experience accumulated by our Salesforce Certified Experience Cloud consultants, we deliver professional consulting services that help you achieve your goals.

If you’re looking for professional assistance with Salesforce community implementation or need robust Salesforce-native apps built on Force.com, reach out to us.

We can also help with data migration into Salesforce Experience Cloud, designing (user experiences) in Salesforce, creating beautiful Experience Cloud sites, such as Salesforce self-service portals, PRM, B2B Commerce and support portals, as well as sites for nonprofits.