In the digital era, the success of a company tightly depends on its ecosystem. In Business-to-Consumer markets, building strong communities of customers, partners or employees is a well-known differentiator, used by many famous brands. For Business-to-Business industries, this is also becoming more and more true. To help companies build attractive and sustainable communities, Salesforce provides a cloud-based solution. With Community Cloud, all the members of a company ecosystem can get concrete benefits, highlighted in this article.

What Is Salesforce Community Cloud?

In a nutshell, Salesforce Community Cloud is a social platform, designed to connect your customers, partners and employees. Users can access it both from desktop and mobile devices. The solution allows companies to implement extended collaboration features, like a portal, but in a few days: no need to spend months on coding and customization before starting to create communities.

With Salesforce Community Cloud, your company can gather all its customers or partners in a single place, which is easier to manage. It can also be used to connect employees. Once the solution is deployed, an organization can easily share information with its communities.

Salesforce platform strongly encourages users to participate in their communities. Active contributors can be distinguished with reputation scores. Recently, the software vendor has added gamification features, such as recognition badges, to push involvement one step further.

The solution also helps companies to better understand their communities through built-in reporting. Included dashboards provide useful indicators such as the engagement rate, the activity or the main topics discussed within a community.

Reinventing Customer Service

With Community Cloud, companies are able to create a unique customer experience on the service side. They can build self-service communities, where customers can find answers in a knowledge database. This helps them solve their issues more quickly. Customers also benefit of an extended support from their peers, as well as from experts and employees connected to the platform.

The solution fosters the proximity between the company and its customers. The last ones can share their experience and best practices with other customers, as well as suggest improvements or new features to your team, in a co-creation logic. This is key to build long-term relationships and increase customer engagement.

The platform also delivers a rich and customized experience to the users, suggesting them groups and topics based on their centers of interest (products, industries, functional domains, etc.). This way, your customers can talk with people who have similar challenges. Community Cloud is also integrated with social media like Twitter, allowing companies to answer the questions of their customers on their preferred channels.

The practical aspects of the customer relationship are not forgotten: the solution provides a place where customers can access and manage all their account information, renew a subscription and even pay their bills. If needed, companies can connect them to their network of partners and resellers.

Bringing More Value to Your Partners

Many companies dream of being able to collaborate with their partners seamlessly, without facing complex integration issues. Efficient collaboration is key to increase sales channels. For organizations with a large network of resellers and distributors, this often represents a real challenge. With Salesforce Community Cloud though, this dream is now reality.

Through the platform, partners have a direct access to your teams. Your company can put all the information needed by partners in the same place, and manage it easily. Partners can share contact information, discuss current deals and access product information with no delay. Some companies even use Community Cloud to train their partners and manage certification processes. All these features help them be more efficient and to close more deals: this brings more value for them, which means more revenues for your organization.

Employees’ Engagement Increased

Salesforce Community Cloud can also be used to enhance collaboration inside organizations. Employees can use it in the same ways as customers and partners, to share information across entities. For example, human resources departments can put all the company policies and other documents in the solution, so that employees can easily find it.

Through Community Cloud, employees can also interact directly with the customers. By providing useful answers to their questions, they feel helpful and valued. This increases their engagement and motivation, and reduces the turn-over.