20 Salesforce Community Cloud Features and Their Benefits

20 Salesforce Community Cloud Features and Their Benefits

Introduction

Salesforce Community Cloud (SCC) is a workspace where you can connect with customers and partners, get the most up-to-the-minute information, share ideas with like-minded individuals on your team, research new products, and learn new skills. SCC incorporates so many exciting features to help drive your sales and community strategies forward. But with so many features, how do you know which ones to use?

Inside this guide, you’ll learn about the following different Community Cloud features and their properties:

About Salesforce Community Cloud

Salesforce Community Cloud Features & Their Benefits

1). Community Cloud Solutions
2). Partner Relationship Management
3). Self Service
4). B2B Commerce Solutions
5). Lightning Community Builder
6). Lightning Bolt
7). Lightning Community Templates
8). CMS Connect
9). Lightning Components
10). Branding Editor
11). Built-In SEO
12). Community Management & Analytics
13). Knowledge Base and Q&A
14). Rich Text Posts & Comments
15). Salesforce CPQ
16). Salesforce Automation
17). Case Escalation
19). Mobile Optimization
20). Personal Member Scoring

About Salesforce Community Cloud

Salesforce Community Cloud is a platform that enables businesses to connect with their partners and customers, no matter where they are in the world. It offers a customizable, branded space that can be tailored to meet the exact needs of your organization.

It allows for the creation of external communities for customers, as well as internal communities for your employees and partners. Communities can be tailored to suit your branding, so you can create a cohesive experience that helps foster loyalty from your customers and employees alike.

With Salesforce Community Cloud, you can:

• Build branded portals to engage and support customers and partners
• Improve customer service efficiency
• Integrate community sites with any app or system
• Enhance collaboration between employees

Inside this dynamic digital community, users can connect with each other, exchange information and ideas, and share relevant content within a secure network. Thereby, giving your organization a way to offer personalized services and support that meets the needs of individual community members.

By engaging with your customers on this platform, you are able to support their success by providing them with information that’s relevant to them, helping them find the right answers to any questions they might have, and allowing them to connect directly with other like-minded customers who want to share their knowledge and experience.

Ultimately, this kind of system gives you an opportunity to deepen your relationship with your customers as you help them fulfill their needs—allowing you to better serve their needs as well.

Salesforce Community Cloud Features & Their Benefits

Salesforce Community Cloud is built on the Salesforce platform and uses that system’s advanced security infrastructure. It enables you to build a customized online community, so you can connect with your customers, streamline your sales processes, and ultimately grow your business. But what makes it such a great tool? Let’s take a look at its features and their benefits.

1). Community Cloud Solutions

Community Cloud Solutions are business apps built on Community Cloud, enabling you to launch new business solutions quickly, at scale. Salesforce knew that business solutions can be tough to launch. That’s why they created Community Cloud Solutions so that a company can have business apps built on Community Cloud ready to go in no time.

Solutions include the Lightning Community Templates, which are pre-built templates that allow you to easily configure and deploy a community. In addition to the flexibility of building from scratch, with the Lightning Community Templates, you can choose from options like:

Self-Service Solution: This template provides a support network for customers in need of information or assistance. It’s great for businesses looking to provide easy access to resources and streamlined interactions between customers and staff.

Partner Communities: For businesses with a partner program, this template provides quick access for partners to submit deals and track their progress through the sales stages.

Customer Communities: Integrating seamlessly with Service Cloud, this template provides an always-available resource for customers who are seeking support or information about your products or services.

2). Partner Relationship Management

Partner relationship management (PRM) is a way of keeping track of relationships with the people and organizations that your organization does business with. Salesforce CRM’s PRM feature allows you to:

• Track partner accounts, contacts, opportunities, and cases
• Create partner channels and assign partners to the channels
• Manage partner programs and discounts
• Define customer hierarchies based on the products they sell
• Track customer assets such as software licenses and service contracts

Partner relationship management (PRM) is built into Salesforce Community Cloud and provides you with everything you need to attract, scale, and manage your partners – all on one secure platform.

With PRM, partner programs can be launched quickly using pre-built templates for specific industries or roles. You can also start from scratch and create your own program using the provided tools. Once your partner program is up and running, Community Cloud gives you the ability to monitor its performance in real-time with insights and analytics.

3). Self Service

Self-service is a feature of Salesforce Community Cloud that gives your community members the resources they need to solve problems themselves, without having to contact customer support. Self-service tools include:

➜ FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions that explain how to use certain features or fix common issues

➜ How-to Videos: Videos that show community members how to troubleshoot issues

➜ Knowledge Base: A searchable database of articles and solutions for your products

Self-service support is a great way to empower your customers to solve their own problems. Why? Because it’s a win-win. Customers get the freedom to resolve what they need on their own schedule, and in the process, you save time and money by not having to answer every single customer query yourself—and can spend more time working on products that keep customers happy.

4). B2B Commerce Solutions

Salesforce B2B Commerce is a cloud-based e-commerce solution for wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers needing to sell their goods to other businesses. B2B Commerce is fully integrated with Salesforce CRM, providing the capability to automatically sync your account and opportunity data, as well as seamlessly share contacts and leads with your sales team.

Salesforce B2B Commerce allows your business to create a portal experience personalized for each customer and partner, allowing them to access their accounts, place orders, check inventory levels, track shipments, and manage returns.

The B2B Commerce feature uses the Community Cloud platform to give businesses more control over the purchasing experience and allow them to manage their relationship with each customer by allowing businesses to:

• Create their own branded storefronts so retailers can buy directly
• Manage orders, inventory, and pricing in real-time
• Keep track of relationships with retailers in one place

5). Lightning Community Builder

Salesforce Community Cloud comes with a feature called Lightning Community Builder, which lets you create custom portals for your customers and employees.

This feature lets you build a community around your brand and make it easy for customers to do business with you, through an online portal that’s branded to match your company. You can easily customize the look of the site with drag-and-drop tools and prebuilt templates, or use the built-in design system to add logos, photos, apps, and more. You can set up your own templates or use prebuilt ones based on your industry, like travel or retail.

The portal can be used by customers to:

• Find answers to common questions in a searchable help section
• Log into their accounts
• Access their order history and billing information
• Submit support tickets

Lightning Community Builder consists of four main areas: Components, Pages, Themes and Branding, and Apps.

➜ In Components, you’ll be able to select from a wide range of components such as custom buttons and tabs, knowledge articles that have been created in Salesforce Knowledge, live agent chat, and more.

➜ In Pages, you’ll be able to create new pages by selecting from a range of layouts such as home pages, record pages, and thank-you pages. You can also add components to your pages by dragging them from the Components list into the desired location on your page.

➜ In Themes and Branding, you’ll be able to customize the look of your community by selecting from a range of available themes or creating your own. Here you can also set how users will access your community by enabling login options such as community self-registration and Salesforce single sign-on.

➜ In Apps, you can create new apps by selecting from a range of templates such as case management communities and partner sales communities. You can also drag pages into the app’s navigation menu to make them easily accessible for your community members.

Not only does the Lightning Community Builder give you everything you need to create a unique online space for your business or organization, but it also has an intuitive interface that will help even non-tech savvy users build beautiful communities quickly and easily!

6). Lightning Bolt

Salesforce’s Community Cloud is a platform that helps companies build and manage customer communities. It helps them collaborate with partners, clients, and the general public.

Lightning Bolt is the newest feature on Salesforce’s Community Cloud. It lets you use pre-built templates to create customer communities so that you don’t have to start from scratch when building your community.

There are templates for all kinds of different industries, including retail, technology, education, healthcare, and housing.

The benefits of using Lightning Bolt are pretty simple: it saves you time and money. Normally, building out a customer community would be both time-consuming and expensive. But with Lightning Bolt, you can build a community in a matter of hours—or even minutes! And you can do it without spending huge sums of money on development costs and resources.

7). Lightning Community Templates

One of the features of Community Cloud is Lightning Community Templates. With Lightning Templates, you can create a community in just a few clicks by choosing from a selection of templates. You can then customize colors, backgrounds, and logos to match your brand, and insert specific content for your customers or partners.

You can choose the template based on two main use cases: customer service or partner collaboration. The customer service templates allow you to provide information to your customers on products and services, as well as submit support tickets or ask questions through forums. The partner collaboration templates give your partners the ability to access important information about products and services or communicate with each other in forums or through chat windows.

Each template uses Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS) CSS classes to render components. A community template determines the structure of the community and what components are displayed on it. You can create multiple templates per community to meet different needs. For example, you might have a basic template with a header and footer that includes links to your company’s social media pages, and another that has a banner image at the top of the page and buttons for submitting feedback or downloading files.

8). CMS Connect

We’re excited to introduce you to CMS Connect, a new feature of Salesforce Community Cloud that allows you to connect your Customer Community directly with an external content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal. This gives you all the benefits of a customer-facing community integrated with the full power of a dedicated CMS.

Build your community as usual, and then use CMS Connect to connect it with your existing CMS. Once connected, you can add content in the CMS, and it’ll appear in your Salesforce community. You’ll also be able to link items in your community back to their original pages on the CMS.

With CMS Connect, you can:

• Use your existing CMS for content that doesn’t need to be managed by Salesforce
• Keep customer-facing content separate from your internal data
• Try out new layouts and formats without losing all the information you’ve already posted
• Ensure that all customer-facing information is easily accessible by site editors who may not be Salesforce experts
• Publish pages directly from Community Cloud to the CMS

9). Lightning Components Library

Lightning Components is a tool library that allows you to add functionality to your Salesforce Community Cloud instance. They’re a set of pre-coded functions that can be added to your site and customized as needed. For example, you could use it to create a “Like” button on your website. Or, you might use it to create an interactive map so that members can see where other members are located around the world.

Lightning Components are essentially HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements that bring us into the age of responsive design. They are customizable, reusable components that can be used on Salesforce Community Cloud pages to create a seamless, engaging experience for your users. You can build Lightning Components with two different tools: Lightning App Builder or Lightning Component Builder.

10). Branding Editor

The Branding Editor tool is one of the most frequently used options found in Salesforce Community Cloud. The Branding Editor allows you to easily customize and style your site, including adding your company’s logo and selecting a color scheme. You can also change the layout of your site and pages, select a background image, and add a welcome message.

The Branding Editor is located under “Community Management” in the Admin menu bar, which is accessed by clicking your name in the top right corner of any page. This editor is your one-stop-shop for customizing your community’s look and feel. It has the following tabs:

➜ The Home tab lets you edit the logo and name that appear on your community’s login page, as well as its features.

➜ The Colors tab gives you access to a color picker so that you can change the color of your community’s headers, body text, background, and more.

➜ The Images tab lets you upload images to use as background images or login banners.

➜ The Fonts tab allows you to choose from a variety of font choices for your headers, body text, and buttons.

11). Built-In SEO

With Salesforce Community Cloud’s built-in SEO features, you can set up your community for search engine success without having to worry about whether you’ve done it right.

Community Cloud will automatically generate meta tags for all pages in your community so that when search engines crawl your site, they’ll be able to understand which keywords should bring users to specific pages. It’ll also recognize the keywords you’ve used in the content of each page, and use them to help it identify the subject matter.

For example, when you create or edit a page, post, or topic in your Community Cloud community, the platform automatically generates the metadata and indexing needed for the page to be indexed by search engines.

The best part is that you can edit these meta tags and keywords as needed, and Community Cloud will handle parsing them out into individual pieces so that search engines can pick up on everything. You won’t have to do any of the legwork—just give it a little nudge every now and then after making changes.

The SEO feature automatically prioritizes the content that you want search engines to see and makes sure that your information gets delivered in a way that maximizes its ability to get attention from search engines.

12). Community Management & Analytics

Community Management & Analytics is a feature of Community Cloud that helps you manage your customers’ interactions with your community. This feature combines Community Workspaces and Community Insights with Google Analytics Integration to give you a better sense of how your communities are performing.

When you use this feature, you’ll be able to get data on page views and unique visitors to your community. You’ll also be able to see reports about the number of profiles that were created or updated within your community during certain timeframes, and you can analyze the level of user activity over time.

A little information goes a long way. Therefore, with Community Management & Analytics, you can make sure your Salesforce Communities are as effective as possible—and keep getting better from there.

➜ Community Workspaces are virtual spaces created within the Community Cloud platform where members of your organization can collaborate on shared objectives and goals. These workspaces can be tailored for specific groups—for example, a workspace for community managers or one for marketing staff. Each workspace has a full suite of tools to help community members communicate and work together: chat, file sharing, assignments, calendars, and more.

➜ Community Insights gives members access to a dashboard where they can see reports and real-time data on how their community is performing. This feature helps team members track the results of their work and fine-tune their efforts by allowing them to adjust settings on a per-community basis. The dashboards are also customizable according to each member’s role in the community, making it easy for individuals to focus on what’s important to them without being overwhelmed by data that’s irrelevant to their job responsibilities.

➜ Google Analytics Integration allows you to connect your Community Workspaces directly with Google Analytics so you can easily view insights around key behaviors like Traffic Acquisition and Content Performance.

13). Knowledge Base and Q&A

Need to know more about the Knowledge Base and Q&A features of Salesforce Community Cloud?

The Knowledge Base is a searchable database of help articles. Users can submit questions, vote on the articles they want to see, and even suggest edits. This allows you to empower your users to help each other by sharing their knowledge in an organized, efficient way. It also lets you categorize your help articles based on customer feedback.

Users can ask questions in the Community Q&A section, and experts can answer them—and all of the questions and answers are searchable, so if someone else asked the same question, they can find it easily. Questions and answers get ranked by an algorithm that looks at who’s asking or answering (experts), how many votes each question gets, and how many likes each answer gets. This means that the best quality content rises to the top, so users will always find what they’re looking for fast.

14). Rich Text Posts & Comments

While the Salesforce Community Cloud is a powerful tool for communication, sometimes you might want to just include a little bit of formatting in your posts. Lucky for you, that’s exactly what Rich Text Posts & Comments do!

With Rich Text Posts & Comments, you can format text using bold and italics, add bulleted lists and even include hyperlinks to any website or page. You can also use rich text formatting as a “code block” to display HTML or other code on the page. This feature is supported both in Chatter posts and comments, as well as in Idea Post Submissions.

Therefore, one of the most important features of Salesforce’s Community Cloud is its wealth of rich text elements. You can add images, videos, links, and more to your posts. This kind of flexibility means that you can make your community exactly what you want it to be, whether you’re trying to create a space for product feedback or just a forum for people who love your brand.

15). SalesForce CPQ

For larger companies, sales proposals can often involve dozens of people and take days to prepare. How can Salesforce CPQ help large organizations make proposals faster and more effectively?

Salesforce CPQ is a product that helps create quotes, manage contracts, and keep track of billing. In addition to helping close deals faster and streamlining the sales process, Salesforce CPQ makes the sales process more transparent by showing you exactly where each deal stands at any given time.

Salesforce CPQ helps companies close deals faster by making it easier to customize and create quotes, contract tools, and billing tools. Doing so can increase your efficiency and reduce errors in your sales process. It also makes it easy for you to keep track of where each deal stands at any given time.

16). Salesforce Automation

Salesforce Automation is a feature that uses Salesforce Community Cloud to help you automate sales processes, manage a sales team, coordinate marketing activities, and streamline administrative tasks. It can be used to track sales leads, store contact information for prospective clients and partners, close deals faster, and track the progress of your sales team.

By using automation, businesses can manage the entire sales process more effectively, including:

• Lead generation, tracking, and qualification
• Account and contact management
• Opportunity management
• Sales forecasting
• Order management
• Activity management

17). Case Escalation

Salesforce Community Cloud offers a feature called Case Escalation, which is an Apex trigger. When a case is created, the Case Escalation Apex trigger runs, and it checks whether the case status has been changed to Closed for more than four hours. If it has, then the trigger will make a new case entry with the same information as in the original case but with higher priority. Case Escalation also allows you to see what time the original case was closed so you can make sure that cases are being escalated automatically.

When you want to create a smoother process for getting cases to the right person or team, Case Escalation is an excellent tool. It’s basically a rule manager which allows you to set up rules that trigger an escalation after a certain amount of time has passed without updating. This way, if a case takes too long to be moved on, it can automatically be directed towards another team or individual who is better equipped to handle it. This tool is great for making sure all outstanding cases are worked on in a timely manner, and also alleviates the stress of having to constantly check your dashboard for updates on cases.

18. Personalized Chatter Streams

You’re a busy person, and Salesforce knows you have a lot on your plate. Therefore, their Personalized Chatter Streams feature is designed to help you stay up to date with all of the conversations that matter to you—without having to waste time checking in on separate streams. It’s super easy, too! Just create personalized feeds for any record you want to follow, and then add them onto the Chatter Stream List. Once they’re on your list, all updates from each item will go straight into one stream, which makes it easy for you to maximize productivity by getting all of your key deals and accounts in one place.

19). Mobile Optimization

With the Community Cloud’s mobile optimization features, your community can be accessed from a variety of devices. This includes smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices, as well as desktop computers.

Mobile optimization is not “responsive,” however—it uses a different process for mobile devices called adaptive design. With adaptive design, the system detects which device is accessing the community and then displays a layout that is optimized for that device. Community members do not need to download an app to use your community from their smartphones or tablets. They can just access it via their device’s web browser.

20). Personal Member Scoring

Personal Member Scoring is one of the most useful features of Salesforce Community Cloud. It determines the score of each member based on their activity, which helps organizations to engage with their users in a more meaningful way.

Salesforce Community Cloud provides a default algorithm that determines the score of each member. However, if you want to customize the algorithm, you can create your own scoring rule by using the available formula editor.

For example, say you want to reward members who have been a part of the community for more than two weeks. You can create a point system that gives these members badges and points based on their membership duration. Then, members can see how many points they’ve earned on their profile page, and they’ll be able to use these points to purchase rewards from your company.

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