The Benefits of Salesforce Communities

Introduction

The technologies that we use transform into a better alternative continuously. At the same time, various businesses are adopting these technologies and expanding identically in the same way these products grow and evolve. One of these kinds of technologies that are currently assisting businesses is called the Salesforce Community Cloud.

Salesforce is one of the leading players globally in customer relationship management tools, and it is widely recognised for its ability to bring customers and businesses closer together.

This integrated CRM platform covers many functions for all your departments, including sales, commerce, marketing, and service, as well as a single common perspective of each consumer, allowing them to contribute to diverse sections of their operations cohesively.

Businesses in today’s world use Salesforce to understand their customers better, communicate with them on multiple levels, and expand their existing customer base.

The paradigm shift in the adoption of digital technologies has transformed how internet users interact with one another and the wider world. The human notion of feeling connected with others around us has lost its true meaning due to the rise of automation in the name of efficiency.

It is essential to support and maintain sales teams and administrative leadership. All parties involved, including consumers, employees, and management, want a genuine relationship with a human being.

Now, this is why there is such a thing as Salesforce Customer Communities, a fantastic technique to drive relationships that will significantly influence the growth of your organization to produce superior results.

In today’s age of digital advancement, the capacity to interact and collaborate has become the primary emphasis of all businesses. Every company or organization’s success depends on its ability to interact successfully with its customers, employees, and other consumers.

An online platform, Salesforce Community Cloud creates branded web portals for engaging customers, employees, and partners in a responsive manner. Primarily, it is a framework that allows companies to rapidly construct branded portals that can be optimized and adapted for mobile devices.

What Are Salesforce Communities

The Salesforce community cloud is a social platform developed by Salesforce to enhance the levels of communication and interaction between a company and its various stakeholders, including its employees, partners, and customers.
The Salesforce Community Cloud uses a social CRM platform, enabling users to share their screens and communicate with one another. During a conversation already in progress, it allows its users to send and receive photos and data in real-time. Customers can search for information and engage with other customers through these platforms, simplifying customer relationship management (CRM). In addition, the console comes equipped with a button labelled “BUY,” which makes it easier to conduct business online.
Employees can use the community cloud for various workplace interactions, including but not limited to human resource management (HRM), troubleshooting, help desk contact, and interactions between teams located in separate geographical areas. Similarly, leadership can utilise it to increase communication with its channel partners and other external parties.

Types of Salesforce Communities

There are three types of communities that Salesforce cloud offers.

• Customer Communities – a self-service portal that gives assistance and feedback (frequently asked questions, articles, documentation, and interactions with other customers — for example, by using a Salesforce Success Community). Salesforce customer communities enable businesses to more effectively communicate pertinent information with one another, improve the overall customer experience, and boost engagement.
• Internal Workforce Communities – IT department can create a portal for Human Resources and Information technology information for the employees within the organization. It allows employees to connect and offers them a single location for shared files, searchable knowledge databases and training materials, scheduling, project management, and organizational documents or announcements.
• Business Partners Community – Salesforce Communities offers a specialized information hub for B2B organizations. It enables their sales teams and resellers to readily obtain critical data and communicate in real-time to close more deals. It is a place where partners can manage their businesses, learn best practices, receive the help they require, and communicate with Salesforce staff in a completely safe setting.

How Salesforce Communities Could Be Leveraged Beneficially

Building Brand Experiences – Salesforce provides a wide range of options for users to modify the look and feel of their communities. To begin, you can customize the appearance to align with your organization’s branding. Making these adjustments can help to improve y

our brand’s image and these communities entailing your consumers, staff and business partners can also work as a trust-building platform.

Not only does a customer community allow them to interact with other clients and staff members of your business, but it also allows them to view interactions that have taken place between other clients and members of your team.

Customers who join such communities spend 19% more than customers who do not participate in branded communities. They can observe how your employees interact with one another, the quality of customer service that your employees provide, and the level of assistance they anticipate receiving from the community if they experience problems with the product or service you provide.

24x7x365 Connectivity – Connections and collaboration are the two most important factors determining a company’s success. Salesforce communities offer a robust platform that can be used to forge new connections and grow existing ones while ensuring seamless integration between the two.

Users can communicate, work together, and complete transactions on the go, regardless of where they are. The seamless ability to share information and knowledge significantly impacts the workforce’s productivity. Providing customers with interactive areas in which they can connect will go a long way in resolving issues and answering questions.

To develop worldwide connections independent of work hours, the various groups that are important to your company are addressed in a tailored manner.

Consumer Research and Insights – With Salesforce communities, you give customers an avenue to express the problems they are experiencing, voice their concerns, and participate candidly with your staff. This is possibly the most valuable aspect of developing a customer community for your business.

A customer community can be an essential component of your techniques for conducting consumer research. It provides a centralized location where your customers can come to you, ask questions, and gain public confirmation that other customers are having the same problem.

The Idea Exchange provides a beautiful illustration of this point. In this section, users can offer suggestions for new additions to the platform and modifications to existing features. As a result, thousands of customers are flooding into their community, pointing out problematic areas, offering proposals for additional features, and concurring with the ideas presented by other customers.

Businesses shell out thousands of dollars for this kind of consumer insight, and Salesforce communities enable you to put these processes on autopilot.

Influencer Marketing – You likely have potential valuable brand ambassadors sitting around waiting for you to start a conversation with them and take your relationships to the next level. This development can be attributed to the fact that you are not constantly engaging in conversations with your customers.

You will have an easier time determining who the power users and public ambassadors for your product and brand are if you use Salesforce communities. They make their presence known by the amount of time they invest in contributing to your community and the feedback they provide to other clients.

You’ll be able to bring those individuals closer to your organization and provide them with the resources that will allow them to effectively become true high-level ambassadors for your brand if you make use of Salesforce communities. You can even contract them into the employee side of things, where you can use the collaboration, file sharing, and documentation capabilities to ensure that you are all on the same page.

A single, straightforward dashboard makes it possible to collaborate on content planning, gather content from social media, and more.

Optimising The Supply Chain and costs – Managing a corporate supply chain can be challenging if the appropriate tools are unavailable. When manufacturers participate in Salesforce communities, they receive access to a wide variety of technologies that allow them to improve how they interact with their suppliers and manage their supply chains.

The distribution of products and monitoring of their placement in stores could be managed through the usage of communities. Any issues in the supply chain management can be identified, and corrective action with the relevant stakeholders can be executed.

In addition, you can create dashboards for your customers and partners by using extension applications for Salesforce communities. These dashboards will make monitoring and tracking simple for your customers and partners. These communities may be customised, and some apps can be used to increase their functionality, making them an excellent tool for any business that wants to improve its supply chain management by fostering better communication and collaboration among employees.

Because this Community Cloud has pre-built custom templates and apps provided by third parties, it is possible to cut down on the costs associated with building bespoke in-house solutions.

SF communities can help in a significant reduction in the amount of money that businesses must spend to construct positive brand stories online across a variety of different portals.

Concluding Remarks

The Salesforce Community Cloud can help in the advancement of your business entity. With the help of these Communities, your clients will have a forum to engage with your company and other customers. They also can benefit from the opportunity of high-quality after-sales service.

Consider these Salesforce customer communities if you want to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, boost customer engagement, boost employee connectedness, and have the ability to interact and collaborate with your customers, including the ability to gain data insights from those interactions.

You can develop a fully functional portal for your customers and thoroughly personalize the experience they have as online customers, regardless of the size of your company.

These solutions can be seamlessly integrated without noticeable disruption to your existing systems. Since there are many avenues for modification, you may make it as straightforward or as complicated as you choose.