Salesforce Experience Cloud – Trends and Opportunities

How the best companies use Salesforce (based on data collected from 1,500 Salesforce customers)

Customers’ Adoption

36% of Salesforce customers that have bought other companies’ cloud products – like Service Cloud, Sales or Marketing Cloud – have also purchased Community Cloud. In addition to that, 21% of respondents intend to purchase Community Cloud in the very near future. If this is true, more than 50% of the most active Salesforce customers will use Community Cloud actively for their business needs very soon. And all of that within two years of the product launch!

As for the adoption of Community Cloud by other Salesforce customers, it looks like Salesforce will need to pay more attention to its marketing and sales strategy for the product to gain more clients.

According to the same survey, the top three Community Cloud uses are for customer service, internal collaboration and partner enablement. Many Salesforce customers use Community Cloud for post-sales customer service, thanks to the amount of resources Salesforce has spent to launch and to improve its Service Cloud.

Many customers of Community Cloud use it more for partner enablement and less for internal collaboration. This is strange, considering the fact that Chatter, the oldest and the most popular part of any community, is a tool for internal communication.

Benefits for Business

Bluewolf’s 2015 State of Salesforce report highlights some Community Cloud business benefits. Comparing those Salesforce customers who use Community Cloud and those who don’t, the report provides interesting data on productivity and cost reduction associated with community products.

Using Community Cloud in tandem with other Salesforce products makes sense for larger companies. Working in this way, large companies can achieve higher productivity and lower their operating costs, both of which are results that would be predicted from this strategy.

Bluewolf’s report on Salesforce Community Cloud highlights some key points about content management and collaboration among companies’ customers, but also raises many questions about them.

One of the most obvious conclusions is that Community Cloud has been successfully adopted by many Salesforce customers worldwide. The combination of Community Cloud and other cloud products from Salesforce guarantees great benefits, especially for external uses.

More data here: https://www.informatica.com/resources.asset.12-28075.pdf