Salesforce Community Cloud Implementation

Salesforce Communities are a great way to collaborate with people who are crucial to business processes, such as customers, partners, or employees.

We can enable communities for both internal and external users, and it can be used within the organization for different purposes. For example, you could create a community dedicated to employee engagement, an upcoming event, and interact with external Users. Or it can be used as a customer support community to reduce support costs. With Communities, we can share a subset of Salesforce features and data from internal Salesforce org, and customize community to use company branding.

Salesforce Community is a powerful platform that offers you to connect with your customers or partners. It is a platform where you can use your internal Salesforce data to interact with external users as per the business need.

Here is the list of benefits Salesforce communities offer:

Since communities are Salesforce out-of-box feature; it provides the ability to choose precisely how and what we share with customers and partners. It includes content and data sharing.

Communities offer to leverage out-of-the-box features like Knowledge Articles, Chatter, Discussion, etc. that help to connect your customers to other highly engaged customers. Customers can answer each other’s questions, which saves overall support cost and increase customer satisfaction.

Communities are configurable, and most of the features are drag and drop, which saves development and maintenance costs

.Communities are mobile friendly and can be accessed from any screen size devices.

Salesforce Communities can be used for different business processes and industries. It offers out-of-the-box features which satisfy most of the modern business use cases across all kinds of industries.

Below are the example use cases:

Community as Self Service Platform – This use case of t=e Salesforce Community is primarily for use between businesses and customers, specifically in the B2C sector. Communities can take your customer service levels to the next level.

Problem – You are a telecommunications services company based in the United States. The main challenge of the Company is a large number of support cases being raised and lack of the ability and resources to respond in a timely manner. This, unfortunately, is leading to customer dissatisfaction.

The Solution & Result – Your company requires a seamless digital self-service experience for your customers that matches the look and feel of company’s branding.

Create a customer community where customers can self-register/login and access knowledge articles related to the services they consume. Salesforce knowledge hub helps to solve issues or answer questions for internal and external users. You can create Knowledge topics and materials in Salesforce and expose it to your customer community. When the user logs in to the community, they can search for a topic or article. In this way, they solve their queries by themselves.

What if the customer doesn’t find what they are looking for? Salesforce community offers out-of-box “Start a Discussion” component. By using it, customers can post a question and start discussing it with other members of community. In this way, customers can interact with other customers and resolve queries using their experience. If they still face any issues resolving their query, they can log a case in community.

Using “Log a Case” component, you can allow customers to create a case in your Salesforce org. While your internal support team works on the case, customers can come to the community and check status, add comments to their case. It opens a gateway to seamless customer interaction experience.

As a result, your company delivers a cost-effective, self-service community with an overall reduction on caseload for contact centres and support agents.

Community as Employee Collaboration & Engagement Platform – This use case of Salesforce Community is primarily for increasing collaboration and interaction between employees of a company.

Problem – You are a Multinational company which has offices and/or factories in different countries. All employees are from different places and don’t get the opportunity to meet/interact with each other frequently. The company is facing challenges in finding a way to achieve better and faster communication across employees, which helps them to increase productivity, communication, and collaboration across departments (or even within departments).

The Solution & Result – Collaboration and communication are essential, but we all know that email is not always the best medium for making collaboration and communication happen. Your company requires a seamless digital experience for your employees, which allows them to collaborate from across the globe.

Salesforce Communities provides an out-of-box collaboration feature called Chatter. The company can enable chatter in community and use it to create an internal network across all employees of the organization. Chatter provides a forum that allows your employees to share posts, polls and questions in community. It also gives users the ability to like, share and comment on feed content.

Your company needs to create community that matches company design/branding and adds out-of-box components for chatter, discussions, employee recognition, etc. Below are the details of out-of-box features available in the community which can help your company to collaborate and engage Employees:

Feed Publisher – This component can be used to create questions, poll, rich text posts and attach files. It also supports multiple file attachments, rich link previews and inline images. It offers a way to add content to a community feed. It works together with the Feed and Feed Compact components. When your company employees create posts using the Feed Publisher, Feed or Feed Compact component need to be used to display and make it available for other users on Community page.

Feed – The Feed component displays a feed item or group interactions, including posts, questions, and attachments created by Feed Publisher component. Feed component serves as the most important component in community discussion. The component provides a chronological, filterable list of posts made with the Feed Publisher component.

Employees can expand view of a post by clicking timestamp of a post. It shows the post and all its related comments. Employees can like, comment and share other employee’s posts, questions and polls.

Recognition Badges – You can use recognition badges to recognize and encourage good work done by Employees in your company. The Recognition Badges component can only display three of the most recent badges earned by a user. It also shows the Give Badge button, and a link to view all badges the user has earned.

Moderation – Community moderation allows you to empower members of your community to monitor content and ensure that it’s appropriate and relevant. You can set up rules as per company policy and norms to automate moderation. It allows Employees to flag posts, comments, files, and messages that are inappropriate or spam. Moderators can review and act on flagged items, such as deleting a comment, file, or post.

By using these features in your community, you can provide seamless collaboration experience to your employees. As a result, it increases employee productivity, improves retention rates, better revenue, lowers absenteeism, the better quality of work, positive work culture, cost saving, motivation to do better, opportunity to show innovation, etc.

Internal Users – Internal users are Salesforce org users who log in to Salesforce via a company myDomain or login.salesforce.com using an internal license. They can access internal Salesforce data and features as per their need. Internal users primarily access the Salesforce platform using Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience. Internal users can also access communities. They require an internal license to log in and use Salesforce.

External Users – Unlike Salesforce Internal users, external users do not log in with myDomain or login.salesforce.com. They are end users such as partners, brokers, customers, dealers, and other external stakeholders. These users get limited access to Salesforce data and features. They need external user license to access Salesforce features and data. A user with an external license can access only the communities and portals that the user is a member of. An external user does not get privilege the internal Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience.

External and internal community users need Salesforce Community license to access communities. Choosing a correct license is very important for any community project in terms of costing and features. Purchasing Community Cloud licenses allow users to access Salesforce data and features based on business needs.

Salesforce Community Cloud offers 6 types of community licenses.

01. Customer Community:

This license is beneficial for Communities that are customer-oriented such as Self-service portal, Knowledge-based portals. With this license, user get access to Salesforce Knowledge Articles, Cases etc. that helps them to self-serve.

02. Customer Community Plus:

It is an upgraded version of the Customer Community. Including all benefits from the Customer Community, it adds to provide the ability to use roles and sharing. It also gives access to reports and dashboards and additional storage.

03. Partner Community:

Partner Community license opens a window for business partners. It gives partners the ability to directly get involved in the Sales process and access to other information. Partner community acts are collaboration channels to partners such as vendors, distributors, and resellers.

04. Commerce Portals:

Commerce Portals license are used in Commerce cloud to provide external stakeholders the ability to access data and features of Salesforce Commerce cloud platform. It can be used for Brand Engagement and Customer Loyalty.

05. External Apps:

External Apps license is an option for use cases where the community is highly customized. This can be used to build a community that does not suffice a self-service customer community or a partner community. It provides access to Standard and Custom Objects. It can be used for multi-level marketing.

06. Channel Account:

The Channel Account license provides the same features, permissions as the Partner Community license. The only difference is that Partner Community license can be priced per login or member-based. But Channel Account licenses are priced only per partner account. It can be purchased when you are not sure how many users need access.

Member-based license – A Community member-based license works like a standard Salesforce internal license. The member-based license allows user to access community as many times as they want. Unlike internal license, it doesn’t allow users to access internal Salesforce features. Users with this license type can access multiple communities.

Login-based license – A Community login-based license consumes a login each time user logs in to a community. Purchase a specific number of login that will be used by users per month. However, logging in multiple times during the same day still only consumes one login and, once logged in, switching between communities doesn’t consume extra login.

To get started with communities, you must first enable it and select a domain. It is available in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning experience.

Below are the steps to enable communities in Salesforce:

Go to Setup → Community Settings.Select “Enable Communities” checkbox.

Enter a Domain name. Note – Domain name needs to be unique, click “Check Availability” button to see if the domain name is available.Click Save.Click OK on the confirmation message.

Once Community is enabled in your Org, you will be able to find additional Community related settings in Salesforce Setup – All Communities, Communities Settings, Lightning Community Pages, Lightning Community Templates and Lightning Community Themes.

Once the community is enabled in your org, you can create up to 100 communities for internal/external users.

Below are the steps to create community in Salesforce:

Go to Setup → All Communities.Click “New Community”. It will redirect you to Community Configuration Wizard.

Select a template according to your business need or Select “Build Your Own”.  Note – We are selecting “Build Your Own” in this example.

Click Get Started.

Enter Name of your Community.

Click Your community should be created and you will be redirected to Community workspaces page.

Creating a Community is not enough. It stays in Preview mode and not accessible until you activate it. Internal or External users can access community once it is published.

Below are the steps to publish community in Salesforce:

Go to Setup → All Communities.

Click “Workspaces” for the community you want to publish.

Select Administration.

Click Activate Community in the Settings tab.

Click OK on the confirmation message.

Once community is activated, make it accessible by Users. To give community access to internal users, make them Community member. There are two ways to add a user to community: Profiles and Permission Sets. You may create new Profiles or Permission Sets specific to the Community or use existing ones. Once Profile or Permission Set is added to Community, related users will be able to access Community.

Below are the steps to enable communities for internal users in Salesforce:

Go to Setup → All Communities.

Click “Workspaces” for the community you want to add internal users.

Select Administration.

Select Members tab.

To add members using profiles:

Note – If you remove permission set from a community, users with that permission set lose access to the community, unless the users are associated with profiles or other permission sets that are still part of the community. Their posts and comments still appear even after they lose access.

Click Save.

Note – When a profile or permission set is added to community, new community members will receive a welcome email. To prevent those community members from receiving welcome email, deselect the option Send welcome email.

To allow an external user to access your community, add the user as a contact record to an Account. Then enable that contact as a customer or partner user, as per the business requirement. You must have “Manage External User” access in your profile or permission set to create or edit external partner users.

Below are the steps to enable communities for external users in Salesforce:

Go to Community Settings.

Select Allow using standard external profiles for self-registration and user creation.

Click Save.

Choose an Account that will be a Partner in Community. Go to Account Record.

Click Enable As Partner from quick action.

Go to Account Record → Contact Related List,  view or add the contact record for the person you want to add to a community.

Select Contact record.

Click Enable Partner User or Enable Customer User from quick action. This will create a user record in your Salesforce org with required details prepopulated from the contact record.

Edit user details and select appropriate license as per business requirements.

Click Save. Note – If you have already activated the community in previous section and want User to get a welcome email, select Generate new password and notify user immediately so that user receives a password.

The rollout strategy for Salesforce communities has four phases: establish, manage, engage, and measure.  The right Rollout strategy helps Community to grow faster.

In each phase, interact with different stakeholders of a community. To grow a community faster, involve different roles and make a future-oriented strategy.

Establish

This is the first and most important phase of a Community journey. In this phase, engage business partners and other stakeholders and design/build a community of their needs.

Manage

In this phase, run campaign programs to promote your community and add community contents that attract your end users. It also includes plans to maintain the community as per user feedback and interest. Upgrade community contents in such a way that it satisfies user needs.

Engage

The ultimate goal of a Community is to engage end users and it is the only way to help your community grow. It includes engagement activities and the reorganization of Community members.

Measure

In this phase, the company run reports using Salesforce reporting tool and checks how active users are engaged to the community. It is a scheduled process that happens in predefine phases as per the company's need. It measures whether community goals are met. The company uses different measurement techniques according to their business use case.