Backdrop:  The year 2021 saw enormous global upheaval and transition. The need to move to the digital world has never been more imperative than the pandemic. There was a paradigm shift in the digital ecosystem. In April 2021, Salesforce changed its Community Cloud for a more modern service. So, Salesforce built an exciting alternative. This is how Salesforce Experience Cloud was born. Salesforce Experience Cloud (formally known as the Community Cloud) is a set of functionalities built on the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. A platform that promotes the creation of connected digital experiences to manage the key people of your business customers, partners, or employees – whoever!  

What is the Salesforce Experience Cloud? 

According to Salesforce, “Experience Cloud sites are a great way to share information and collaborate with people who are key to your business processes, such as customers, partners, or employees. Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support community, HR central, or something else, an Experience Cloud site is a great place to connect with the important folks in your life in a new and different way. Use easy point-and-click branding tools with ever-evolving Experience Builder templates, or go with Visualforce to create branded collaboration spaces.” 

What Can You Build Using Experience Cloud? 

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionalities built on the powerful Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Experience Cloud to build a digital experience, the world is your oyster! You can create a digital experience for any situation where you want to present a beautiful external-facing interaction with your Salesforce CRM. 

Popular examples include: 

Partner portal 
Account portal 
Storefronts 
Microsites 
Industry solutions 
Customer service hub 
Help centres 
Support site 
Mobile app 

What Kinds of Experiences Can you Create? Salesforce Community Types 

Let’s take a look at three key types of communities that are tailored to the various groups of community members: 

#1 Customer Community 

A customer community is a self-service portal that provides support and feedback such as FAQs, articles, documentation, and discussions with other customers. Salesforce customer communities help organisations share relevant information, improve customer experience, and increase engagement. 

#2 Partner Community 

It is a B2B information hub that enables sales teams and resellers to quickly obtain critical data and communicate in real-time to close more deals. It’s a secure environment where partners can manage their business, learn best practices, get assistance, and connect with Salesforce employees.  

#3 Internal Employee Community 

Teams can organise the sections according to the objectives, projects, or events using this site—furthermore, access to documents, information, and streamlined data to improve personal productivity. 

Features of Salesforce Experience Cloud 

Data Integration from Any Source: With Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can integrate data from any source, including leads, prospects, cases, campaigns, orders, financial reports, and custom objects. 

Personalisation: Salesforce Experience Cloud enhances the target market, audience, and user segmentation by leveraging CRM data. Optimise the digital experiences that your business provides with a variety of fully functional templates for all sorts of mobile devices, all with a simple and intuitive interface. Furthermore, it is built on a responsive design base. 

Boost Collaboration: Manage personalised badges to honour your community’s most engaged users. Members of Experience Cloud can also suggest others based on their skills and experiences. 

Real-Time Tracking: To optimise brand experiences, Experience Workspace allows you to measure, process, and analyse data from your sites via customisable Lightning dashboards. 

Optimise Response Management: You can compile the available brand information across all sites and experiences. This enables you to gather and analyse conversations, files, and groups in a single version of the truth, resulting in a more unified experience and better response organisation. 

Analytics For Decision-Making: Reports and dashboards can be presented to the customer, community users, and partner community users. 

Why Should You Use Experience Cloud? 

You’re offering stakeholders what they need using Experience Cloud. Additionally, your CRM is fully integrated into what you are doing. This indicates that you are creating and preserving a single source of truth with a broad view of your business, customers, and partners. Here are the top 10 benefits of Experience Cloud.  

It’s fully integrated with your CRM Salesforce system 
Go to market fast with industry-specific customisable themes 
Create multiple experiences for specific needs 
It allows you to get higher profit by generating leads, holding online events, accepting payments, etc. 
It improves the marketing experience 
Design for every device since all digital experiences are 100% mobile-optimised and fully responsive 
It is open to upgrades with configurable apps and components available on AppExchange. The Salesforce events app can elevate your online and offline events. 
Manage your knowledge management system more efficiently with AC Knowledge Management Enterprise, a robust Knowledgebase Component for your Salesforce Community Cloud. 
It’s integrated with Google Analytics so that you can track the usage of your sites, including the number of visits, number of page views, average time spent on the site, etc 
It’s Salesforce native, which means advanced security and accessibility. 

Are you ready to implement Salesforce Experience Cloud in your business? With our certified consultants, we have solid expertise in various industries and a proven standardised approach for integrating the Experience Cloud into your business. Contact us.

Notes 

https://www.salesforce.com/in/products/experience-cloud/overview/ 
https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.networks_overview.htm&type=5