The Advantages of Salesforce Communities
The digital boom has transformed the ways in which we interact with the world. However, with the rise of automation for the sake of efficiency something gets lost.
What is that something? It’s simple: feeling connected. Employees, customers, and leaders alike crave real, human interactions. It’s the key to maintaining and allowing teams, sales, and executive leadership to thrive.
Salesforce communities exist for this very reason; a phenomenal way to propel connections that will greatly impact the growth of your business for the better. Whether you’re seeking to drive the bottom line, forge greater customer satisfaction and outreach, or aiming to boost internal morale, you’ve found a comprehensive solution with seamless integration. Here’s everything you need to know about the advantages of Salesforce communities and what they can do for you and your business.
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Apps Associates creates successful communities for customers, partners, and employees, using our own toolkit to build them faster and more efficiently than ever before.
What are Salesforce Communities?
Salesforce is a San Francisco based company that provides customer-relation management (CRM) software solutions. Above all, Salesforce communities are brand spaces that work to facilitate collaboration and connection for employees, business partners, and customers.
It doesn’t stop there, however, as Salesforce’s CRM software further provides tools to benefit your business’s marketing efforts, commerce, service, and sales.
Salesforce communities can be created within the CRM platform, providing a streamlined way to collaborate and share insight and information with the people who are within this community. Those individuals within a Salesforce community are those who are crucial to your business processes: employees, partners, and customers.
To reach those communities most effectively, Salesforce allows you to create multiple communities that serve different purposes and needs for your brand. There are three distinguished types of communities that can be created, each tailored to the community members.
Let’s take a closer look at the different tools and targets across these three varietals: customer communities, employee communities, and partner communities.
Salesforce Customer Communities
More often than not, customers have questions. If your organization lacks easy access to answers to commonly asked questions, you risk losing current or potential customers. No one wants to jump through hoops to receive a response to a concern. By implementing a customer community, finding answers and asking questions is simplified and streamlined.
Salesforce’s customer communities function as self-service portals that offer FAQs, discussion pages, articles relevant to the products and services you offer, and process documentation.
Salesforce Partner Communities
Partners to your company are also in need of a collaborative platform. Partner communities are an all-encompassing destination for resellers and sales teams.
By creating a single portal that provides all of the necessary information, collaboration, and company data, partners can work more efficiently and accurately to close in on the best business opportunities.
Salesforce Employee Communities
Employees often need to share information and files, retrieve and read company announcements and documents, as well as manage projects.
Rather than using separate platforms for these needs, an employee community takes care of this in one comprehensive portal. File sharing and requests for information or knowledge become more efficient and streamlined.
The Top 4 Advantages of Salesforce Communities
In order to fully understand the opportunity that awaits you, we are going to highlight the top 4 benefits of integrating Salesforce communities into your business.
1. Stay Connected — Anytime, Anywhere
Connections and collaboration are the keys to success, and Salesforce communities provide a robust platform to forge new ones and grow existing ones with seamless integration.
No matter where in the world users are, they can connect, collaborate, and close deals in the here and now. Sharing files and knowledge is effortless, greatly improving employee efficiency. Customer concerns and questions can be resolved quicker than ever, by providing interactive spaces in which they can connect with one another.
The different groups that matter to your business are addressed in personalized ways to establish global connections that aren’t reliant upon business hours.
2. Customize Your Experience To Suit Your Needs
In addition to streamlined workflow, Salesforce communities are highly customizable. Using the Experience Builder tool, you can adjust facets including access, and the theme of the portal to match your company’s branding.
Customization includes the ability to customize recommendations. This can drive engagement within your community, urging members to take certain training, for example, or to watch videos. You can customize the access of individual users within each community as well.
Whether you need to allow someone to view more documents, or decrease someone’s scope of access, Salesforce communities are not “all or nothing.” You can customize the totality of access on a case by case basis.
3. Craft Your Brand Experience
Salesforce offers prebuilt themes for community pages. However, you are certainly not restricted to them, especially as Salesforce has a distinct style. There are third party providers who allow you to quickly and easily create engaging, user-friendly community experiences for your customers, partners, and employees using clicks, not code.
4. Users Take Control
Salesforce communities thrive because of the users within them. By establishing customer, employee, and partner communities you are encouraging a collaborative atmosphere that will encourage sharing, helping, and communication.
Within community portals, employees can share files, access documents, and contribute to ongoing projects. Partners alike can benefit from this environment to reach a consensus on sales targets and approaches to drive the bottom line.
Customers are encouraged to interact with one another as well, to come together and solve questions and concerns.
Key Takeaways
A CRM platform that provides you with an even greater opportunity to forge connections across all of the groups that matter to your company has arrived. Whether you’re seeking to boost sales, improve customer satisfaction, or employee connectedness and inclusivity, Salesforce communities offer you the space you need to reach all of your business goals.
With such a high degree of customization, you can make it as simple or complex as you desire. This affordable software solution is not out of reach and can be seamlessly integrated with the familiar systems you currently have in place.
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Apps Associates creates successful communities for customers, partners, and employees, using our own toolkit to build them faster and more efficiently than ever before.