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Salesforce Community Cloud is a social CRM platform aimed at enhancing communication between a company and its employees, partners, and customers; and is one of the best tools of such kind. Among other things, it gives employees access to help desk communication, human resource management (HRM) and troubleshooting, while the management can use it to improve communication with its channel partners and other external parties.

In this article, we’ll talk about the benefits and features of Community Cloud and when it’s best to consider using this tool in your company.

What Is Community Cloud in Salesforce?

Community Cloud Salesforce is an online digital experience platform by Salesforce that helps businesses across various industries to better reach and manage their relationships with customers, partners, and employees. Communities created within this platform can be used for getting clients’ feedback, providing customer support, lead qualification, training, and much more. It’s up to you to decide how to use its features within and outside of your organization.

Here are some Community Cloud features you can use:

• Business Integration allows integrating and connecting data from third-party sources and systems.
• Personalization helps to apply a personalized approach to relationships with customers and partners and let them find the information they need faster. 
• Branding provides a variety of pre-built themes and templates to choose from to make sure your communities match your brand image. 
• Engagement allows creating online communities and keeping its members active.
• Mobile helps to make sure your communities can collaborate and get the information they need from any device anywhere in the world. 
• Community Management & Analytics provides valuable insights into your community member behavior and interests to let you customize and optimize your services and products in accordance with your customers’ and partners’ needs.

Features of Salesforce Community Cloud

Now let’s expand on the features of Salesforce Community Cloud for your business by going deeper into its functionality: 

• Lightning Community Builder: The Lightning Community Builder is a user-friendly, drag-and-drop tool that enables users to design and customize the look and feel of their community absolutely code-free; it offers a flexible and intuitive way to create visually appealing, responsive community pages.

• Lightning Bolt Solutions: Lightning Bolt solutions are pre-built templates and components designed for special use cases; they accelerate community deployment, enabling teams to quickly launch industry-specific communities, such as customer service portals or partner collaboration platforms.

• Personalized Community Experience: Salesforce Community Cloud enables companies to create a fully branded and personalized online community for their customers, partners, and employees.

• AI-Powered Recommendations: Salesforce Einstein AI that is integrated into the Community Cloud is able to deliver personalized recommendations to community members. Einstein uses machine learning to suggest content, products, or experts based on individual user behavior and preferences.

• Collaboration and Engagement Tools: One of the often overlooked features of Community Cloud, it also provides a suite of collaboration and engagement tools – Chatter, for instance, that is used to facilitate communication and knowledge sharing within the community. With it, members can collaborate on projects, share files, and engage in discussions.

• Partner Relationship Management (PRM): The software crucially includes Partner Relationship Management (PRM) capabilities, enabling businesses to build partner communities; this streamlines partner onboarding, collaboration, and deal management, in turn leading to stronger partner relationships and increased revenue.

• Integration with CRM Data: Salesforce Community Cloud seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM, allowing community members to access and interact with CRM data in real-time. This ensures that community members have access to the most up-to-date information, enhancing collaboration and productivity.

• Mobile-First Experience: Salesforce recognizes the importance of mobile accessibility, so its Community Cloud offers a mobile-first experience, ensuring that everyone can access and engage with the community on various devices, including smartphones and tablets. 

Benefits of Community Cloud

An idea of building an online community for your business might sound complex and the fear of not getting the desired results is a common thing. What if my business is not big enough? How do I make sure this will work? Questions like these concern thousands of business owners. But the truth is that Salesforce Community Cloud Salesforce provides a great number of benefits that can help companies of any size to empower their relationships inside and outside their organizations and make smart business decisions. These are only a few major benefits you can get:

• Build better relationships with customers and partners

The stronger your business relationships are, the better results you get. Let your customers get a better experience when reaching out to your company. This way you’ll be able to increase your brand awareness and credibility, as well as make sure your clients are satisfied with your services and products. 

• Cut costs

This platform allows your partners and clients to get the information they need without additional effort from your employees. As a result, you save time and money on repetitive and ineffective operations, thus giving your staff an opportunity to get to more important tasks. 

• Improve your product/service

Collecting data on your community’s behavior and feedback helps your employees to monitor its activity, as well as to customize and improve your products and services to make sure they fulfill your customers’ needs. Thus, your company responds better to market requirements, while customer satisfaction rates continue to grow.

• Deliver better customer support

Customer data generated by the platforms allows making sure none of your clients’ questions or requests are left unsolved. This is a very important step that plays one of the main roles in your future success. 

• Enhance employee engagement and performance

Since all the data is gathered within a single platform, your employees can access any information they need and exchange this data easily across all departments. It helps to improve communication inside the team, thus, increasing its productivity.

• Seamless integration

Whether you utilize Salesforce’s native integration or create a custom API for other backend systems to merge data for various sources, users will be able to access the data they need on demand and at once. This will enable you to have a full view of your customers and partners in order to deliver the best quality of service at the right time and report on performance in a closed-loop approach.

• Rapid portal development

Did you know that you can build a portal in no more than 30 days? Portals between businesses used to be built on an individual basis. On top of that, they would be developed by people who would need to take their time to learn all the ins and outs of each shareholder in order to create the right application using Java, PHP, or .NET. The Salesforce Cloud platform provides multi-corporate portal development possibilities which are built into its structure.

• Impeccable customer experience

Whenever your customers can easily access your FAQs and use the appropriate guidelines without your involvement, it enables agents to dedicate more time on more business-critical tasks. Community Cloud in Salesforce also provides you with an overview of your agents – it displays their activity levels, their endorsements and skills. Some other features are case escalation, e-commerce and community engagement.

Why Use Salesforce Community Cloud

There are many reasons why Community Cloud can be beneficial to your business. If you want to drive more sales, deliver high-quality service, and manage key operations and relationships via a single platform, this Salesforce solution will be a great pick. 

If you want to learn more about the solutions that can help your business scale and evolve, reach out to the Salesforce experts at OMI. Our team will be glad to answer any questions you may have and choose a solution that perfectly aligns with your needs.