March, 2023 | Advanced Communities

Salesforce Customer 360 and Its Benefits for Businesses

Posted on March 15, 2023July 1, 2024 by Julia Yerikova

In today’s competitive business world, delivering an exceptional customer experience is critical to success. Salesforce Customer 360 is a revolutionary customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a single view of the customer across all touchpoints.

Keep reading to discover all the benefits you can expect.

What is Salesforce Customer 360?

Salesforce Customer 360 is a customer data management platform that helps businesses connect with customers at every step of their journey, providing personalized experiences and enhancing customer satisfaction.

It unites your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT departments, allowing them to collaborate seamlessly and achieve greater productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.

How Does it Work?

By integrating data from multiple sources, Salesforce Customer 360 creates a single, unified view of the customer.

This view includes customer profile information, transaction history, engagement data, and more.

With this data, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs, using this information to tailor their marketing and sales efforts.

Salesforce Customer 360 Architecture

It’s a cloud-based solution that is highly scalable and secure. Unlike other software products that function as a single product, Customer 360 is a complete suite of products, including Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and more, all offering a range of features. Traditional software products work independently to collect and use data for specific departments.

However, with Salesforce Customer 360, sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT teams can connect and access unified data. This shared data structure enables different teams to use the data according to their use cases, and take further steps accordingly.

Salesforce Customer 360 Features

Salesforce Customer 360 offers a wide range of features designed to improve customer engagement and drive business growth.

These include customer data management, segmentation, personalization, marketing automation, sales forecasting, and more.

The platform also incorporates AI-powered tools that enable businesses to automate routine tasks. Let’s look closer at three features.

Unified data and improved consent process

Salesforce Customer 360’s greatest strength lies in its ability to unify data and manage consent.

With this solution, businesses can collect data and gain insights into their customers to create a comprehensive profile of their preferences and behavior. You can manage customer data in the form of cookies for first-party members, whether known or unknown.

With the framework’s consent received, the business can give their employees access to this information to help them make better-informed decisions.

AI-powered Einstein analytics

By leveraging artificial intelligence, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and develop better relationships with their customers. For instance, AI algorithms can analyze what ads users have clicked on, and what products they usually buy, as well as information from customer profiles so they can make personalized product recommendations to customers.

Personalization options

Use customer data to create a personalized experience. Personalized engagement is crucial in closing more deals as it focuses on the specific problems or challenges that customers face and the solutions they seek.

For instance, if a customer segment purchases products in a specific category, like kids’ items, sales reps can offer discounts on this product category to encourage them to complete the purchase. This personalized engagement can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer satisfaction, ultimately benefiting the business.

What Makes Salesforce Customer 360 So Useful to Businesses?

Customer 360 offers a range of benefits to businesses, including personalized customer experiences, scalability, usability, unification, integration, collaboration, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Using customer data, the platform can help create tailored messaging and provide a single source of truth for customer data.

With a low code interface, it has a small learning curve and can be scaled up or down to meet the business’s needs. It connects teams using different capabilities, breaking down information silos and allows for more integrated customer engagement. Automated enablement and simplified data intake enhances sales rep productivity, leading to faster and more detailed responses to customers.

How Much Does Salesforce Customer 360 Cost?

The cost of Salesforce Customer 360 depends on the specific features and services that a business requires. Pricing is based on a subscription model and provides two primary options: Editions and Add-ons.

Editions includes packages of our most popular features, tailored to suit different business sizes and requirements.
Add-ons offer tiered functionality to customize your CRM solution, so you can select any products to help your organization get exactly what it needs. To learn more about our products and pricing, please visit the Salesforce Product Pricing page.

For nonprofit, education, or philanthropy organizations, Salesforce offers a special version of the CRM platform, and other reduced or no-cost solutions, through salesforce.org.

The Last Word

Salesforce Customer 360 is a powerful platform that enables businesses to connect with customers in new and meaningful ways. You can equip your sales, marketing, and support teams with the tools they need to save time, simplify their work, and achieve their full potential.

This powerful platform includes features like business opportunity management, sales collaboration, lead management, sales projections, email tracking, and much more. All designed to help take your company to new heights of productivity

Advanced Communities specializes in Salesforce Experience Cloud and we are passionate about building engaging Experience sites for the most beneficial communication with clients and partners.

Our highly experienced and qualified team is always here to answer any questions and help in creating any kind of portals you might need. So, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Data Access and User Permission Management in Experience Cloud Sites

Posted on March 13, 2023August 24, 2023 by Anna Babur

One of the standout features of Salesforce is its flexible, multi-layered sharing model, which allows you to assign different data sets to different sets of users. This feature reduces the potential for data theft or misuse, while also making it simple for users to access the data they require.

As organizations continue to adopt Salesforce’s Experience Cloud, it becomes increasingly important to understand the various tools and techniques available for managing user permissions and data access within the platform. In this article, we will explore the concepts of permission sets and profiles, and provide you with best practices for securing your site and managing data access.

Data access levels in Salesforce

Data access and user permission management is an important part of any Salesforce Experience Cloud site. Without proper organization, users may struggle to access the data they need; or they have too much access to data that isn’t relevant to their job. Before discussing the most effective methods for managing user permissions and data access within a Salesforce Experience Cloud, it’s important to know about the various levels of data access available in Salesforce. This will help you understand how the security system works within the platform.

You can determine which users can access specific data within your organization, whether for the entire organization, a particular object, a specific field, or even a single record.

Organization

Establish a roster of approved users for your entire organization, including password policies, and restrict access to specific times and geographical areas.

Objects

Object-level security in Salesforce refers to the ability to control access to specific records within an object, such as an account or contact. By setting object-level permissions, you can restrict a certain group of users from performing certain actions, such as creating, viewing, editing, or deleting records relevant to a specific object.

Records

Record-level security in Salesforce refers to the ability to control access to specific records in an object based on the user’s profile or role. This is achieved through the use of sharing rules, role hierarchy, and manually sharing records with specific users or groups.

Fields

Field permissions control whether a user can see, edit, or delete the value of a particular field on an object.

How do you manage user permissions in Salesforce Experience Cloud?

In Salesforce Experience Cloud, user permissions are managed through profiles and permission sets.

Profiles

Profiles define the level of access a user has to various Salesforce objects and fields. Each profile can be customized to provide different access levels to other users. For example, a user with a “Customer Community User” profile may have read-only access to certain objects, while a user with an “Admin” profile may have full access to all objects.

The benefit of using profiles is that they can help you save time and money when configuring your Salesforce Experience Cloud. Instead of setting up individual permission settings for each user, you can assign profiles to groups of users and manage their permissions from there. It allows you to quickly make changes to the system without manually adjusting every user’s settings; making it much easier to keep your data secure and ensure your system is configured correctly.

Permission sets

Creating permission sets allows the granting additional permissions to users beyond their profile allowances. For example, a user with a “Community User” profile may be granted access to a specific object or field through the use of a permission set. Create a permission set in Salesforce to grant additional access and permissions without having to change users’ profiles.

How to create permission sets? To manage user permissions in the Salesforce Experience Cloud, create profiles and permission sets that align with your organization’s access needs; then assign permission sets and profiles to the appropriate users. It can be done through the Salesforce Administration menu, under the “Users” or “Permission Sets” sections.

The Future of User Management in Salesforce: Switching From a Profile-Based Access Approach to Permission Sets

Salesforce has recently announced a significant change to the data access and user permission management, bringing a new era of user management in Salesforce.The company has reported the end-of-life (EOL) of permissions on profiles, which will take effect in the Spring ’26 release.

How do you control user access to your Experience Cloud site?

Experience Cloud sites can be accessed in two ways: by logging in as an authenticated user or accessing the site as an unauthenticated, or guest user.

Access for authenticated users

In Salesforce Experience Cloud, access for authenticated users is controlled through profiles and permission sets. Profiles and permission sets are used to manage site membership during the setup process. Adding a profile or permission to a site’s membership gives access to the site for users with that profile or assigned permission set.

User Permission Management Experience Cloud

Guest user permissions

You can also publicly distribute your Experience Cloud site to external users. In the Salesforce Experience Cloud, guest users have access to certain pages, content, and features designated as public, but you may need to grant access to all the features and functionality available to registered users.

To provide access to guest users and manage external users’ permission, an administrator can set up guest user profiles and configure the site’s settings to allow guest access to specific pages and content. It can be done by setting the public access level to the Experience Cloud site or by creating Sharing Rules.

Top 5 best practices for securing data access in your Experience Cloud site

In this section, we share valuable advice on how to ensure the security of your Experience Cloud site. We will go over the 5 best practices to consider to safeguard your data. Let’s dive in.

Regularly review and update user permissions

Regularly review and update user permissions to ensure that only those who need access to sensitive data and functionality have it.

Keep your Experience Cloud site and add-ons up-to-date

Keep your Salesforce Experience Cloud site and all third-party applications used on the site up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates.

Monitor and audit user activity

Monitor and audit user activity to detect and respond to suspicious activities quickly. Salesforce provides built-in logging and reporting tools that can help with this.

Limit the data that guest users can access

Only provide guest users with access to the data they need to accomplish their specific tasks, and restrict access to sensitive information. Create sharing rules that allow guest users without login credentials to only access the records they need.

Train your employees on security best practices

Employees play an important role in maintaining security. Provide training on security best practices so they fully understand the importance of security in the organization.

Advanced Communities is here to help!

If you are facing challenges with the Salesforce customer self-service portal, Salesforce member cloud portal, eCommerce sites, or any other type of Experience Cloud site, remember, it’s always best to leave it in the hands of the experts.

Years of experience and strong expertise in Salesforce Experience Cloud development and implementation makes Advanced Communities an old hand with any Experience Cloud task!

Tell us what you need and we’ll do our best to help you!