Explainer Overview Yes! You finally reached Part 3 of our 3-part Experience Cloud Series! Nice job. If you haven’t had a chance to read Parts 1 and 2 of this explainer series, be sure to check those out here and here. All three parts offer insight into the world of Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Communities). Welcome to Part 3! Now that you’ve read parts 1 and 2 of our explainer series on Salesforce Experience Cloud, you’re ready to get your communities up and running! If you’ve been brainstorming and innovating ways to use this cloud to make your business even more irresistible, you’ve probably thought of the many benefits of taking on the challenge. Building out a community in Experience Cloud is nowhere near as challenging as deciding on the perfect place to get started! Once you start building a community, it’s a little like a can of Pringles—you just can’t stop! There are so many useful features of a Salesforce community, but we wanted to choose seven to highlight for today’s final explainer post. We hope our top favorites inspire you even more. 1) Customer Engagement and Collaboration Your customers already really like your brand. Imagine if they could go to a place where other customers, who also like your brand, give them new ideas on how to use your product or service. They interact with each other and share success stories on how they’ve used your product or service. They go from solo patrons of your company to a band of friends who all have your brand in common. Now they’re engaging with each other, collaborating with each other, and becoming powerful brand ambassadors of your company; all because you gave them the space to be able to do exactly that. 2) Customer Self-Service Your customer service agents or client success representatives are busy—and sometimes the questions or concerns that your customers have are pretty transactional. You can give them a branded community space with a way to find the answers to their questions quickly, without needing to pick up the phone or wait for a return email. Now, that’s a powerful way to let your customers know that you have already thought about some of their challenges and invested in the portal to give them what they need, when they need it. 3) Employee Engagement Your workforce is increasingly remote; perhaps even spread across the country or globe. Your 2000s intranet just isn’t cutting it anymore. Imagine a community where your employees can come and share resources, find others just like them, and feel more connected to the rest of the organization. Empty-nesters who love psychological thrillers, there’s a book club topic for you! Travelers who have learned how to make keto breakfasts at a hotel continental offering, there’s a healthy eating on the go stream for you! What a way to let your employees really bring their whole selves to work. 4) Partner Engagement It sure can be hard keeping your channel partners up to date on new products, services, offerings, spiffs, recalls, and challenges. A community just for partners with tear sheets, collateral, sales motions, and all of the other resources they could possibly need at their fingertips is incredibly powerful—and Experience Cloud is really the way to do it! 5) Personalization We all know this to be true: your prospects, customers, employees, and partners want a truly personalized experience. From emails to curated searches, no one wants to sift through the noise to find what truly matters to them. The ability to personalize Experience Cloud to build a community that seems like it was tailor-made just for your community member is invaluable. This will keep them coming back again and again, knowing that your brand is invested in making them feel one of a kind. 6) Templates No more cutting and pasting, copying text, or writing a slightly different version of the same message. The ability to templatize in the Experience Cloud allows you to spend your time on the things that actually do matter. Once you start to narrow down what productive templates you can create to make your experience more efficient and effective, you can take that valuable time to focus it on the priorities that truly need you the most. 7) Mobile Optimization Ah, mobile. It’s so expected in 2020 that it’s almost silly to mention it. But if you’ve ever created a website, you know that the mobile version of the desktop can sometimes be an entirely new build. The good news is, these communities are already optimized for mobile, so you can be sure that your Experience Cloud is ready to go for your iOS or Android users, straightaway! Make a Community Yours So, there you have our seven favorite features of Salesforce Experience Cloud. With such a powerful and incredible tool, we are willing to bet you will find seven more and seven more after that! Go forth and prosper with your customers, employees, and partners, in your brand new community! Need a Few Community Architects? At Shift3 Technologies, we use a consultative approach to help you determine the best strategy to identify your challenges, implement appropriate solutions and enhance your systems. Need to rekindle your users’ love for Salesforce? Check out this 5-minute read. For a free consultation, click here. This post was written by Shannon J. Gregg, President of Cloud Adoption Solutions. Shannon is an aficionado of sales technology to increase efficiency in the sales process and an early adopter and adoption influencer for sales technology systems, particularly Salesforce and technology that integrates with the Salesforce platform. Shannon is known as a change agent, particularly in M&A environments (VC/PE), with a successful track record of integrating process, product/service pricing, pricing methodologies—and notably—global teams with cultural sensitivity.