Your Guide to Community Salesforce Cloud Portals for Customers and Vendors
Salesforce needs no introduction as this SaaS provider has managed to win millions of hearts with its unmatched functionalities and utilities. One such highly beneficial offering of Salesforce is Community Cloud or Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals.
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Offered to leverage the cloud computing offering of Salesforce, Community Cloud brings best-of-breed integration, collaboration, and customization opportunities to customers’ disposal.
What does it actually do?
How to bring it into action?
What are the challenges?
These are some of the questions that should be answered well before you think of harvesting the benefits that Community Cloud reaps. So, let’s get started.
Salesforce Community Cloud — Empowering the Developer Community
Strategically speaking, Salesforce Community Cloud is a cloud-based social interaction platform using which Salesforce users, vendors, employees, and partners can interact with each other.
Other than speaking mind, sharing thoughts, offering a remedial solution, the platform is extensively used is to bring top-notch business integrations into action so that third-party assistance and resources can be utilized in full swing.
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The distinct features of Community Cloud are as quoted below:
· Personalization so that each partner or customer gets service delivery as per the need of the moment.
· Branding is used to enhance community and business interaction. There is a wide range of pre-made themes and templates offered.
· Engagement enables continual contact of the community members.
· The mobile feature ensures that communication is not device-dependent and can be initiated anytime and from anywhere.
· The Community Management & Analytics feature provides detailed and data-driven insights into the community member behavior and optimizes the service accordingly.
· Files ConnectOne feature makes third-party file integration and sharing easier than ever. It can fetch the desired files from the device and the social media platforms instantly.
· With Custom Landing Pages features, you’re all set to make your community interaction more impactful and enhance its overall feel. It optimizes the screen and brings everything needed on a single platform.
· SecurityBuilt is responsible for the robust security architecture of Community Cloud.
Three Pillars of Community Cloud
The community cloud is made up of three key components, customer, partner, and employee. There is a separate portal assigned for each component. As the employee portal is only for those working for Salesforce, we won’t talk much about it. In general, one should be well aware of the customer and vendor/partner portal.
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Salesforce Customer Portal
This Community Cloud Portal is dedicated to resolving the issues and hurdles that B2B or B2C customers are facing with Salesforce products & services. The core emphasis of this portal is to improve customer service and provide constant and need-based support.
It is a self-service solution allowing customers to fix the issues by themselves. Or, they can post the problem in the community and get advice and assistance from other customers.
One can be part of this portal after doing a simple registration. There are two types of community licenses offered for customers.
· Customer Community License that is best suited for users seeking peer-to-peer assistance. As the user community of Salesforce is already huge and features more than a million users, getting an effective remedy is a sure thing.
· Customer Community Plus License is the advanced version and helps customers to get B2B and B2C assistance without being involved in Sales cases. Immediate access to the dashboard and advanced sharing options are offered to improve the assistance delivery.
Some of the key facilities offered to the community members are:
· Social collaboration
· Custom branding
· 10 custom objects
· Distinct Salesforce identity
· Idea submission
· Q&A portals for effective self-service
· Articles for knowledge and assistance
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Salesforce Vendor/Partner Portal
Those who are Salesforce partners and deals in its service/product delivery can be a part of the Vendor or Partner portal of the Community Cloud. Salesforce distributors, resellers, affiliates, and other professionals can register here. This portal features highly complex sharing abilities and even keeps a track of opportunities shared with the partner.
For seamless and effective communication and idea exchange, the portal features Partner and Channel Management. The feature enables partners to raise issues directly to the suppliers.
Other than all the Customer Portal features. The below-mentioned capabilities are endowed to the members of this portal.
· Role-based data sharing to reduce the data theft and unauthorized access incidence
· End-to-end lead and opportunity management
· Easy import/export
· Real-time dashboard access
· Delegated administration capabilities
· Deal collaboration and productivity tools to empower the partners
What Salesforce Community Cloud Can Do?
Well, Salesforce Community Cloud is not like any other offering service provider.
It’s a step taken towards better service delivery and double-up Salesforce’s utility in the actual world. If one is concerned about why it took place and what benefits it brings to the table, pay attention to what we’re saying next.
For every business, knowing the customer feedback and real-world performance of the service/product is imperative so that things can be better from how they are at present. With Salesforce Cloud, the job is done easily as customers and partners share their experiences on the platform without any hesitation. The collected data permits Salesforce to find out the loopholes and work on them immediately.
With Salesforce Community Cloud, streamlining critical business operations is easy. In fact, organizations can extend them beyond the specific departments and offices.
The platform capabilities are not limited. All sorts of business needs and requirements can be discussed here. All in all, business requirements at a large are handled wisely.
Community Cloud members permit community members to leverage the CRM data with other members and third-party resources directly. These instant data sharing capabilities make a huge difference one seeks an immediate remedy.
As told above, Community Cloud supports community branding and customization. With such extended customization, it’s easy to create branded and customized communities that will lead to flawless enterprise collaboration and streamlined business processes.
While one becomes a member of Community Cloud, CMS can be used as a creative and controlled workspace wherein it can develop, manage, and sync every sort of workflow. Content management becomes a piece of cake as one can create new blogs, social posts, emails, and any other type of content as per the need of the hour.
Salesforce Partners have a chance to grow their sales as they can have a centralized inventory and lead management system while collaborating with other vendors. As data sharing and collaboration can be done instantly with a respective product expert, partners can present the asked information without wasting time.
Get Started With Customer & Vendor Portal on Community Cloud with Stridely Solutions
From the above text, it’s clear that being on Community Cloud means a better Salesforce service experience and improved ROI. However, getting started with this service can be too overwhelming for the prospective members as there is licensing hassle, payment, proposal invites, and much other stuff to look into.
Let Stridely Solutions be your helper in this task. A trusted and seasoned Salesforce Consultant and Partner, Stridely Solution will help you understand the minute details of the community registration, bring it into action the right way, and extract the maximum output from your community license.
The Stridely Solutions experts will design a solution-ready Community Cloud portal for you and help you resolve the existing issues in no time. So, hire them today, be a part of the world’s most active and enriched community, and improve your Salesforce experience.
