by Mike Walsh | Sep 19, 2019 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Salesforce communities can be a huge boost for any business because it allows you to connect with your partners, customers and internal team in a curated and functional way. You can connect your Salesforce org, define exactly what data will be shown to users of the community and custom tailor it to your use case, sales, customer support, knowledge bases, you name it.
Because communities can be so flexible and useful, there are also a number of considerations and options relating to creating a community, specifically around licensing. There are actually 6 different licenses for external community users:
- Customer Community
- Customer Community Plus
- Partner Community
- Lightning External Apps Starter
- Lightning External Apps Plus
- Channel Account
Each of these licenses allows a different type of access and each is associated with an individual user. As a bit of clarification, a user is someone who will login, and use the community. Guests to the community (ex. Knowledge base sites) have no restrictions.
How do you get licenses? Simply put, you buy them from Salesforce. Generally, they are purchased in bundles, depending on your individual needs. Once you have them, you can go into Salesforce and assign the different contacts as users of your community. As an alternative, you can purchase logins, rather than licenses. Logins are a one time use, and are a great option if you have a large volume of potential users, who may or may not exist in your org.
Want more details?
Click here to get the breakdown on community licenses from Salesforce!
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
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CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
by Mike Walsh | Oct 4, 2018 | Blog, Salesforce Tips
Here’s the situation: your business has a number of great products/services. You are doing a robust business. And you have a whole bunch of customers contacting your support team every day asking for help. Of course, you are happy to support your customers in any way you can, but the sheer volume of calls and messages is beginning to overwhelm your support team and causing other operational slowdowns. So what do you do? Salesforce Communities Cloud!
What is a Community Cloud?
Community Cloud is a Salesforce platform that gives companies the tools to create a branded online community to connect with customers, external partners and employees.
Customer communities can be used for many different needs, including:
- Support and feedback
- Qualifying leads
- Tracking revenue
- Discussion and collaboration
- Providing product information and training
- HR and IT information resources
The Salesforce Communities Cloud is a great addition to the Salesforce Service Cloud that can significantly streamline all of your service needs. Communities can function as many things: a portal, a help site, a support forum, and whatever your preferred iteration, Communities allows you to better engage and support your customer community. How so? Communities creates an interactive and secure online site where customers can log on to self-service any questions or issues they may have, access account information, or connect and collaborate with one another.
This has a couple of effects. First, it drastically reduces the number of cases your team has to handle. It gives your community an easy way to find solutions without sitting on hold for hours. Finally, it allows a better way to engage the community, increase support and build trust among your client base.
Getting Started
So now you might be thinking, yes, it sounds nice to have a vibrant and comprehensive online portal and community, but we don’t have the time or budget to create something like that! Good news, Salesforce Communities Cloud is designed to be easy to set up. In fact, many communities are up and running in as little as 30 days!
Communities come with a number of different, scalable templates to make development a breeze. No coding is necessary, custom components can easily be integrated and everything can be customized, on brand, and totally mobile-ready.
Finally, Communities comes built to seamlessly integrate with Salesforce CRM data, such as leads, accounts, activities, and opportunities. No time-consuming processes, or wonky integrations here.
Benefits of Communities Cloud
So now we come to the fun part. We have told you that the community cloud solves for a number of common service issues, but the community cloud is about more than just making things easier for your support and service teams. Below we have listed a few of the other benefits you can see from using Communities Cloud:
Improved Customer Relationships
You can populate your online hub with just about anything that will help your customers, such as tutorials, FAQ’s, databases of questions and answer and even allow them connect with each other and your company. The more resources and content-rich you get, the better your customers can have a self-guided experience that lets them find all the info they need! Not only does it deepen your relationship with the customer, but it builds trust, dependability, accessibility and improves customer loyalty in the long run.
Better Feedback
A hidden gem of Communities Cloud is that it allows you to research your products, and get all sorts of feedback and use cases directly from your customers!
By observing your community’s natural behavior, you can easily find out the biggest sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, what new features your base is hoping to see, and what issues or questions are the most common (pointing the way to items that should be fixed)
Save Money
Which part of management doesn’t like saving money?
In the end, providing quality customer service and support takes time and resources. So, by having a quality portal that lets customers self-solve their issues, you will free up many of these resources to be used elsewhere. This results in a significant reduction of expenses. For example, in England, it’s estimated that a popular online community for diabetes patients has saved the National Health Service over a million dollars each year in hypoglycemia cases alone.
Additionally, because a quality community hub better establishes your reputation, builds customer loyalty and increases engagement, companies often see an increase in sales and long-term customer retention as a direct result of activity within their community!
Who Should Use Communities Cloud?
An online community isn’t just for B2C companies. Just about anyone who is already using Salesforce Service Cloud will benefit from Communities. No matter your business, you can make your service and support much more pro-active and timely with Communities.
-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team
If a highly customizable community solution sounds like something that would help your business, drop us a line. CloudMyBiz works with you to develop and implement the best possible community, custom tailored to your business’ unique needs.
Contact Us
CEO of CloudMyBiz Salesforce CRM consulting services with a deep knowledge in the lending industry. Taking keen interest in the project management side of operations, playing a vital role in the 31% YOY company growth. Strategic leader, mastering the ability to problem solve at every level of the business, providing effective solutions for clients.
