Salesforce Experience Cloud Overview

The Digital Age

In this digital age, businesses are now looking for a holistic approach when it comes to the services that they provide to their customers and potential clients. Gone are the days when businesses only focus on marketing and hard selling to keep their company alive. With everyone migrating their presence to the internet nowadays, cyberspace has become businesses’ new battlefield. And with the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have learned to optimize the online experience for customers in such a way that they will be experiencing premium service even without face-to-face interaction. Understandably, competition becomes more cutthroat and fierce.

With that, the advent of holistic platforms has been ushered in. One of these is Salesforce, and we’re here to know more about one of its features, the Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Getting to Know Salesforce Experience Cloud

Before we do a deep dive into Salesforce Experience Cloud, we should briefly talk about what Salesforce is. For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar yet, Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM)software used in sales, customer service, marketing, and analytics, among others. A customer relationship management software, as defined by Salesforce, is a technology used to manage a company’s interactions with its existing customers and even its potential customers as well.

What, then, is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce defines Experience Cloud as an online social platform that serves to connect partner companies to their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. It serves as a collaborative platform among them. In correlation, it is a set of functions built within the Salesforce platform that’s designed to provide a holistic digital experience to its customers. Salesforce Experience Cloud allows partners to create their very own websites, forums, and apps using their platform. Clients can create customer portals, knowledge platforms, lead management for internal use, and so forth, and it allows for customization in accordance with the needs of the partners. And the best news? These are all possible in Salesforce Experience Cloud. It empowers businesses to offer digitized solutions and services, making them more competitive and relevant in this digital world. 

A quick comparison to its predecessor, the Salesforce Community Cloud

Some may say there’s no good reason to look back. However, it can be beneficial to look at how far something has come and to put things in perspective moving forward.

For those who are already familiar with Salesforce solutions, the name Salesforce Community Cloud might ring a bell. That is because it is the predecessor of Salesforce Experience Cloud. Some loosely say that Experience Cloud is the “improvement” or “upgrade” of Salesforce Community Cloud. And it is, in more ways than one. When Salesforce Experience Cloud was released in 2021 to take the place of Community Cloud, it debuted with many new and improved features that surely gave Salesforce Community Cloud a run for its money.

For starters, it now allows customers to create marketing sites for customer acquisition and retention. Before, the Community Cloud only allowed partners to create and host communities. In addition, Experience Cloud provides an avenue for online communities to foster interactions among customers, businesses, and stakeholders. It can even help businesses in creating landing pages to help generate leads and eventually convert them into actual sales.

The name change from Community Cloud to Experience Cloud is neither arbitrary nor for mere affectation. Such change reflects and shows the platform’s more robust functionalities and offerings, making it a more competitive platform that is sure to deliver all that the customers need in CRM software.

Why Use Salesforce Experience Cloud as Your DXP Solution

There are other types of CRM or customer relationship management software out there, but here are a few reasons that make Salesforce Experience Cloud worth it as your business’s digital experience platform:

▪ It helps in digitizing and streamlining business processes

▪ It provides a platform for businesses to create online communities where they can interact with their stakeholders

▪ It helps increase sales for your business by optimizing your platforms and providing solutions for your business

▪ It helps in lead generation and lead conversion, ultimately resulting in additional profits for the business

These are just some of the few benefits that we could name. Once you are able to explore and maximize the platform’s potential, there will certainly be a lot more that you can get from Salesforce Cloud Experience.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Licenses and Their Features

Salesforce Experience Cloud offers different kinds of licenses, each with different features. Let’s do a rundown of each one of them so you will know which one can best fit you.

Customer Community and Customer Community Plus

This type of license is especially useful for businesses that sell directly to their consumers, or what they call the B2C model of business. In the license’s most basic form, there will be no access to standard Salesforce Roles and Sharing. However, suppose your account is under Customer Community Plus. In that case, you’ll be given access to such functionalities, with the addition of access to reports and even other dashboards that you can explore.

Partner Community

This type of platform is made especially for Salesforce partners to give them an optimal environment to administer their business and interact with their suppliers.

Channel Community

This license has the same permissions and features as a Partner Community license but is priced per partner account that, in turn, grants access to users. This license is optimal for interactions between multiple employees from the same partner.

External App

This kind of license is apt if you wish to create your own application for your business and then link it to your Salesforce account. That way, you’ll be able to put together an app that has all the features that you need.

Thus, before going ahead and subscribing to any particular license, it is best to make sure and study each feature first and compare it with your business needs to get the best possible deal.

Changing Experience Cloud Licenses

There are certain restrictions in the event that you wish to change from one Experience Cloud license to another. This is one of the reasons why we are encouraging you to thoroughly evaluate your business needs before deciding which license you’ll be availing of.

First, the different licenses have different qualities. For instance, some licenses are restrictive when it comes to new users; they will not allow for an easy change with a few clicks of your mouse but will require you to create a new user in order to have access to the system. Another reason for this is that a change in the license would mean there are changes in the permissions and restrictions made available to the specific user.

So, do keep these things in mind before deciding to change licenses.

Sites That You Can Develop Using Salesforce Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a very versatile platform. You can create almost anything that your customers need in a digital experience platform, and more.

To give you an idea, here are a few common uses of the Salesforce Experience Cloud platform by businesses:

▪ Knowledge of help centers

▪ Customer portals

▪ Community hubs

▪ Marketing sites

▪ App building

▪ Partner sign-in accounts

▪ Member/employee sign-in accounts

…And many more; this list is not exhaustive. Trust that whatever it is that your business needs, Salesforce Experience Cloud’s platform can take care of it. All you need to do is explore its functionalities, and it’s sure to give you what you are looking for.

Benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud

What better way to let clients decide and appreciate their CRM software than to list out the benefits that it gives to them and their businesses? In this section, we will enumerate some of the benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud to shed some light on the platform’s strengths:

▪ Websites, apps, and other solutions created in Salesforce are highly customizable and thus, let the users add features or introduce improvements as easily. This feature ensures that all the needed attributes of the solution that you are creating are included in the rolled-out version.

▪ It optimizes your company’s marketing strategy, which ultimately leads to an increase in profit. Marketing is hard work, but with Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can create a marketing platform that works for you…and works hard.

▪ Optimized websites and other solutions help generate leads and transform them into actual sales. We all appreciate a platform that delivers, and this is one example.

▪ Apps and websites created in the Salesforce platform are relatively easy to create and, once created, are highly intuitive. Moreover, they are very much compatible with the larger Salesforce umbrella of solutions because of course, it is made of the same platform. Compatibility is off the rails on this one.

▪ It optimizes digital solutions for mobile experiences. The website or platform is viewable on mobile devices! This way, you won’t have a hard time on smaller screens and will still get the same optimal result as when you are viewing it on a large screen.

▪ And, most importantly, this feature is inside the umbrella of Salesforce solutions. This gives it a stamp of assurance that the solutions produced are robust and sound.

Key Features of Salesforce Experience Cloud

There are quite a number of features of Salesforce Experience Cloud that makes it ideal as a CRM software solutions provider.

▪ Salesforce Experience Cloud is secure. Seeing as Salesforce now implements mandatory MFA, or multifactor authentication, the data that you store is protected from possible cyberattacks that might misappropriate your data. Salesforce takes your account’s security very seriously, and your account in the Salesforce Experience Cloud is no exception.

▪ Solutions are mobile-friendly. Websites, apps, microsites, and other Salesforce Experience Cloud solutions are very viewable on mobile devices for the ease of access to clients and even customers.

▪ It is easy to generate reports and data for analysis. Business decisions become more and more data-driven, and it is in this endeavor that this feature comes in very handy. This way, you’ll come up with a more scientific and sound business judgment, backed with data that was properly analyzed and sifted using the software.

▪ Third-party apps are compatible with the software. Especially so that when initial data are already lodged there, Salesforce Experience Cloud allows third-party apps to function within its platform. This is one of its many strengths; it does not necessarily limit itself to organics but is open to third-party apps or solutions integration, all for a better partner experience. Of course, it has a feature that you can create your very own app, but until you are there, these third-party apps are welcome.

▪ Salesforce Experience Cloud encourages and facilitates engagement. Its platform supports the engagement of its participants by providing features that inspire them to do so. This includes badges and milestone markers that you can earn every time you make an interaction.

Summary

As businesses move to provide customers with the best experience, having a well-rounded platform becomes a necessity. Salesforce Experience Cloud perfectly fits the bill because of its versatile functionalities and highly customizable solutions. As it has different licenses that offer different kinds of functions, make sure that you have a full assessment first of your business needs so you can take advantage of the best Salesforce Experience Cloud license that will best suit your needs, more so because changing licenses can be quite tricky.

Salesforce Experience Cloud offers lots of benefits, among them its customizability and security. It is even optimized for a mobile experience and is compatible with third-party apps to facilitate easy migration and use of data. Truly, Salesforce Experience Cloud is a well-rounded solution for any business’ digital needs. Put the power of Salesforce Experience Cloud in your hands.

If you need more help understanding Salesforce, Salesforce Experience Cloud, or any of the other numerous Salesforce applications, check out Pong Solutions. Our expertise can be a benefit to any of your company’s needs.

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