Every organization requires some platform to communicate with their customers and users, as maintaining healthy customer service is crucial for the growth of a company. The community is a great way to share information and collaborate with people who are important to your business process, for example, employees, customers, or partners. The Salesforce community provides companies with the ability to communicate with users in a secure and controlled environment.
What is salesforce community ?
The Salesforce community cloud is an online cloud platform offered from salesforce.com that is designed to serve as a communication medium for the company’s employees, partners, and customers.
The Salesforce community provides a facility to create different groups within the organization that can be used to share information, informing customers about updates, posting content, or solving problems. Later on, if the organization wants to give a better look and feel to the community, they can use Visualforce and site studious for branding and further customizing the community.
The Salesforce community allows users to screen share, chat, exchange information and images during the conversation. As it’s a salesforce product it provides support for customer relationship management such as web leads, third-party integration, etc.
The salesforce community cloud also offers features such as login packages which provide various login profiles for the community such as pooled log in or named user login, this helps to reduce cost expense that would be required in other community-building portals.
10 Salesforce Community Examples
Many big companies are successfully using the salesforce cloud community to attend to their users and provide support with forums, FAQs, knowledge base, categorized groups, idea sharing, etc. Popular Salesforce Community examples are –
1. Logitech Support
Logitech which is known for its products in wireless technology utilizes the Salesforce Community for its customer support page.
2. Hulu Help
Hulu which provides streaming services and on-demand TV and movies also use salesforce community cloud. Hulu Help is an example of a customized salesforce community to solve the query of the users.
3. Ancestry Support
Ancestry which has the world’s largest collection of family history records uses the salesforce community cloud for addressing customer problems and attending them. You can check the salesforce community cloud implementation on the Ancestry Support Page.
4. Nokia OZO Product Support
Nokia OZO Product Support Page is the successful implementation of salesforce community cloud with the help of community forum, FAQs, Knowledge Base, Virtual Support, etc.
5. Trailblazer Community
The Trailblazer community is an example of an active salesforce community cloud, it is a peer-to-peer community where the users can connect to each other and discuss their queries regarding Salesforce’s features and services.
6. Home First Finance Community
The Home First Finance community is an example of the salesforce community. The home first finance provides affordable housing loans to its customers and utilizes community cloud platforms to connect with customers.
7. CEAT Support
CEAT which is one of the leading Indian tire manufacturers uses many salesforce products such as sales cloud, service cloud, salesforce community cloud, etc.
8. Home Depot Community
The Home Depot community is also powered by the salesforce community cloud.
9. Air Asia Customer Support
The Air Asia Customer Support is an example of the salesforce community cloud. The Air Asia Customer Support provides services such as AI-powered Chat Bots, Vast Knowledge Base in article form for users, Travel Notices, etc.
10. BigCommerce Support
BigCommerce uses the salesforce community cloud to provide customer support. BigCommerce Support Page has features such as Knowledge base is a form of in-depth article, a Community forum to ask questions, News and Updates section to get the latest product news and Ideas section.
11. Relativity Community
Relativity Community is powered by the salesforce community cloud. The Relativity community offers sections such as article & discussion, Connections to join groups, Ideas sharing section, and section to set profile preference.
12. Opentable Help
Opentable helps diners to find and book the tables for occasions in the restaurants. The OpenTable Help which uses the SF community cloud helps the diners to solve their queries with help of FAQs and a knowledge base.
13. Equinix Partner Central
The Equinix partner central is an online portal powered by SF Community cloud which provides the latest partner information and sales and marketing resources.
For more salesforce community examples – Salesforce Customer Success Stories.
Importance of Salesforce Community with Examples
The salesforce community cloud can be used to create different communities within the organization for different purposes such as creating a customer support community for reducing the support cost, channel sales community for partner deal support, or community dedicated for an upcoming event.
For example, you have a company that is trying to sell power equipment and the demand for the company’s product is growing day by day. With the increase in demand, the requirement to engage with the customers and partners is increasing.
In the above example, the salesforce community cloud can be used to create the community with few clicks such as customer portal, partner portal, customer site, or help forum with our company branding and logo on the community.
Benefits of Salesforce Community Cloud
Easy Creation
The salesforce community cloud provides an easy-to-use environment that enables the user to easily customize the community to match the brand of the business with the online community. The community can easily integrate with the business data for centralizing the work of the customers, partners, or employees.
Easy access
As the community is built on a cloud platform therefore it can be easily accessed through any mobile browser or on the salesforce mobile application. This does not limit the access of the community within the organization.
Provide Information
The community allows users to help themselves to find the informational articles and to access support from other members by posting queries on the forum.
Collaboration
The community helps the users to collaborate with other people to work together on the same project. The salesforce community offers various tools that help the employee and customers to interact with each other, share files and records, call for meetings, chat forums, etc.
Drive Sales
The Salesforce partner community connects dealers, distributors, and resellers to help increase the sales of the product. The community can provide services to the partners such as lead conversion, marketing fund approval, interactive dashboards, etc. All these in return help the company to drive more sales of the product.
Simple Steps to Build Salesforce Community Cloud
- Choose a template that suits the needs of the organization.
- Select a theme for customizing according to the company’s branding.
- Use Drag and Drop to add components and content to the community.
- Connecting the business data, process, and process.
- Click on the launch button to deploy the community on the web.
Types of Salesforce Community Cloud
The salesforce community cloud has different types of community. They are –
Partner Community
The partner community consists of people who serve as the medium for selling products to end-users. For example, selling the product to a dealer or retailer who will, in turn, sell your product to the end-users such as the Car manufacturer sells the car to the car dealer. The partner community focuses on solving the queries of the dealer, reseller, retailer, etc such as how to order in bulk, what is the eligibility to become a dealer, taxes for shipping, etc. The Salesforce partner community also offers tools such as real-time audio-video sharing and chat messaging to collaborate.
Customer Community
The customer community consists of people who are the end-users. These communities are geared towards solving the problems of the customers. These communities help customers to engage with products and access information. For example, computer accessories products such as chips and harddisk have a dedicated community around the information about the product such as how to use them or what software is required, etc.
Employee Community
The employee community specifically focuses on members of a company collaborating and work together effectively. There can be multiple employee communities that can be grouped for people working for the same project or same aspects of the business. The employee community makes it easier for addressing the team, sharing information, reviewing the schedules, finding training materials, making announcements, and collaborating. When someone has a query, he can post on the forum space for discussion and finding the solution.
Aayush Kumar Gupta is the founder and creator of ExploringBits, a website dedicated to providing useful content for people passionate about Engineering and Technology. Aayush has completed his Bachelor of Technology (Computer Science & Engineering) from 2018-2022. From July 2022, Aayush has been working as a full-time Devops Engineer.