The creation of a customer and/or partner community portal extends the rich insights provided by a CRM database to external users and is a key way to run a better business with Salesforce. Employee Communities are also a growing way businesses are providing more effective channels for their employees to communicate with each other. There are several key benefits of using Salesforce Community Cloud to build your partner or employee portal.
Salesforce Community Cloud is essentially a framework for organizations to rapidly build branded portals that can be customized and optimized for mobile. Your Salesforce Community Cloud implementation also includes Community Builder, which offers templates users can design to easily incorporate third-party and custom apps and integrate data from any system. Single sign-on and identity also enable streamlined access to multiple communities.
In addition to partner channel sales and customers, you can also use Community Cloud for collaboration with agencies, suppliers, vendors, patients, students, alumni, retail locations, job applicants, or anyone else critical to your business success.
The benefits of Salesforce Community Cloud web portals include:
1. Accelerated Development: Deploy a Community in as Little as 30 Days
Yes, you can build a portal in as little as 30 days. Previously, portals between companies would be built individually by programmers who would need time to learn the intricacies of each stakeholder in order to develop the right application using Java, PHP, or .NET. The Salesforce Cloud platform has the multi-corporate portal technologies built into its structure.
2. Affordable, Predictable Pricing and Support
Community Cloud is a pre-built framework that offers a lot of value over developing a custom application that must be maintained and improved over time with your own internal resources or development shop. Custom in-house solutions also increase the cost to integrate with CRM, your customer service solution, and marketing automation programs. Ongoing support of a SaaS-based Community Cloud will require fewer resources and can be handled by a Salesforce administrator rather than IT.
3. Mobile-Enabled
Another key benefit of using Salesforce Community Cloud is that it’s already mobile-enabled, meaning you don’t need to build a separate mobile component that can significantly increase the cost.
Keep in mind that you may need to optimize for mobile with responsive design when considering your customized branding, user experience and processes specific to your requirements. Hiring a Salesforce Consulting partner with expertise in mobile and Community Cloud deployment is critical to your application’s success.
4. Integration Friendly: Close the Loop on Marketing and Sales
Use the native integration to Salesforce or build a custom API to other backend systems to connect data in disparate systems so the right users can access the right data in real-time. You need a 360-degree view of your customers and partners in order to provide the best service at the appropriate time and report on performance in a closed-loop approach.
5. Differentiate Your Business, Products, and Services
Streamlining the processes your stakeholders take to do business with you is key way businesses are differentiating themselves in a competitive environment. Use technology to your advantage by creating a delightful experience that facilitates the success of all parties involved.
6. Collaborate and Connect Like Never Before
Partner Channel Sales
Use Salesforce Community Cloud to Streamline Channel Partner Communication and collaborate for mutual success. Connect directly with resellers, distributors, and partners to increase sales. Enable partners to find the information and experts they need, register new leads, update records, and manage funds.
Customer Service
Use Salesforce Community Cloud to provide a rich, self-service experience that also enables them to connect with each other to troubleshoot issues and share resources. This also enables your service agents to concentrate on the most complex and impactful issues.
Employees
Reasons to build employee communities in Salesforce are much the same as partner channel sales and customer service. Salesforce Community Cloud provides a one-stop-shop for employees to ask questions, review their schedules, log cases, log tickets for IT, manage expense reports, find training materials, search knowledge databases and collaborate with co-workers.