Get Started with Community Cloud

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the benefits of Community Cloud.
Describe how your company can engage with customers and partners using digital experiences.
List the benefits of a digital experience built on the Salesforce Platform.

How Your Community Can Help You

Whether you call it a portal, a help forum, a support site, or something else, a community is a beautifully branded digital experience connected to your CRM. Community Cloud makes it easy to create these experiences, engage customers, and empower partners.

Check out this video for a quick overview of how communities work in your Salesforce org.

You can create multiple communities and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes—and many companies do just that. Since communities live in your Salesforce org, you can choose exactly how customers and partners access content and data.

The Community Cloud Advantage

What is the advantage of building a digital experience using Salesforce? Two words: integrated everything. Here’s a short list of how you can use Community Cloud to give stakeholders what they need.

Create multiple experiences for specific needs.
Extend business processes to partners and customers.
Integrate data (such as orders or financial information) from third-party providers.
Use themes and templates to create beautiful branded experiences.
Use Salesforce CMS to create content and deliver to any channel.

Data from your community lives in your Salesforce org, and data living in your Salesforce org can be shared externally through your community. (Don’t worry. Your admin controls both data visibility with the outside world and which audience can access what—just like you do with your internal Salesforce org). In short, a digital experience built using Community Cloud provides a window into your Salesforce world.

Let’s take a closer look at how Community Cloud helps one business improve its relationships with customers and partners.

Engage with Customers and Empower Partners

What can you do with a digital experience built with Community Cloud? Almost anything you want, but here are some common use cases.

Customer Service and Account Portals: Empower your customers to find solutions to their customer-service issues on their own with access to your knowledge base, your service agents, and peer-to-peer support. In addition, give customers access to their data in a member portal.

Partner Relationship Management and Channel Sales: Increase your (and your partners’) revenue stream by collaborating on opportunities and deals. Onboard partners quickly by sharing content and training materials.

Different types of portals and communities are all possible with Community Cloud.

Are you intrigued? We hope so, since we look at specific communities types more in depth in a little bit. Now that you’re more familiar with Community Cloud, you’re ready to explore using it to engage with your customers.

Resources