Get Started with Experience Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the ways an Experience Cloud site can enhance your customers' user experience.
- Explain the value of creating a site vision and purpose.
- Write a site vision and purpose.
The Value of Experience Cloud
Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support site, or something else, an Experience Cloud site is a beautifully branded digital experience connected to your CRM. Experience Cloud makes it easy to create experiences that engage customers and empower partners.
A thoughtfully crafted site built on Experience Cloud can have an outsized impact on your brand. Here are just a few potential benefits.
- Improve customer satisfaction with easy account access through a self-service portal.
- Encourage customer engagement through discussion forums.
- Convert visitor information into new leads with event-specific microsites and the Lead Form component.
- Simplify support interactions with self-service knowledge base articles and resources.
Powerful! But an effective site doesn’t spring to life overnight. It requires dedicated planning, aligning the right team members, and understanding your customers’ needs. In other words, before you dive into the design and build phase, pause and spend some time thinking about the combination of features and team members you need to deliver an effective site.
In this module, you follow our friends at Cloud Kicks to see the key steps and ideas they consider, research, and incorporate as they develop their overall plan for a new Experience Cloud site.
Cloud Kicks sells stylish custom sneakers that are a hit with celebrities and professional athletes, not to mention people who attend a certain popular tech conference in San Francisco. Let’s catch up with the team. 
The world is only a few months away from an exciting, once-every-3-years, international sports competition, The Great Athletics Event. With its sports-enthused customer base, Cloud Kicks plans to launch a pair of limited-edition sneakers for the event. It wants to sell the new kicks directly from its existing commerce site, and wants to create a temporary website to build excitement and allow Cloud Kicks fans to sign up for notifications about the upcoming limited sneaker drop.
Cloud Kicks’s awesome admin, Linda Rosenberg, is responsible for helping set up and maintain Cloud Kicks’s new Experience Cloud site. And the community manager, Erica Douglass, is responsible for nourishing the site and keeping site members engaged.
Define Your Site Vision and Purpose
A clear site purpose helps your team take a strategic approach to building and managing your site. It’s the first step to building a compelling website that adds value for you, your customers, and your partners. From there, clarity about your target audience, conversion actions, goals, and measurements are sure to follow. And the time investment is worth it.
A clearly defined site purpose helps you:
- Gather the right people to drive your site to fruition.
- Ensure all team members are aligned on the site’s overall goals.
- Determine the best site framework and template to use.
- Develop the design of your website, including the layout and which pages and features to include.
- Set up your site for success when you plan your rollout and adoption framework.
At Cloud Kicks, Erica is in charge of creating the site vision and purpose. Erica is informed, in-touch, and deeply connected to the Cloud Kicks customer base. She loves that customers love Cloud Kicks shoes, and she also knows that a happy customer is a returning customer. Erica jots down some site vision and purpose ideas fueled by her extensive knowledge of the Cloud Kicks customer base. Let’s see what she wrote.
Objectives
What key elements of the Cloud Kicks business will the site address? Will the site lower costs, increase brand awareness, or simplify operations? Do we need a business flow, like a registration or onboarding process?
- Improve engagement. Create a central location to learn about the limited-edition sneakers and get excited for the drop.
- Gauge customer interest in limited-edition products. This is our first limited-edition sneaker. Having interested customers sign up for more information helps us estimate how many pairs of the new sneakers to produce.
- Increase brand awareness. This experience can introduce new customers to Cloud Kicks.
Next, Erica considers potential use cases based on the objectives she identified.
Use Cases
The core of our strategy and the user experience. Use cases help define, map out, and prioritize how we want customers to use the site. Define an initial set of use cases and align them with our business objectives. What’s most important for our site to support the user experience we want to create? What’s the priority on these various use cases?
- Learn about the limited sneakers. Create an experience where users focus on the limited-edition sneakers, piquing their interest.
- Get excited about Cloud Kicks products. Through the exclusive experience, get new customers curious about and engaged with the entire line of Cloud Kicks products.
- Sign up for notifications and early purchasing access. Let customers register for a reminder to purchase the limited sneakers when available.
With her focused objectives and use case ideas as a guide, Erica crafts a site vision and purpose.
The purpose of our site is to engage customers, gauge interest in custom products, and grow our contact list by introducing customers to our limited-edition sneakers and encouraging customers to sign up for more information.
That’s a great foundation! By taking time at the beginning of the planning process to create a site vision and purpose, Erica set the Cloud Kicks team up for success. The team now has a clear understanding of the site’s intent, which will help them build a site that’s engaging and useful for both customers and Cloud Kicks.
