Welcome to the Experience Revolution

Today, customers expect an easy and inviting online experience that WOWs. It goes without saying, brands are at a disadvantage if their websites are not fully optimized and personalized with customers’ needs in mind.

In fact, users say personally relevant content from brands increases their purchase intent by 78%.

Plus, a better user interface (UI) could raise your website’s conversion rate by 200%, and a better user experience (UX) design could yield conversion rates of up to 400%. (Forrester)

These personalized shopping experiences are made possible through clean, reliable, timely, and consolidated data.

Bringing all your data together in one place (by feeding it into a marketing automation platform, customer data platform (CDP) or a CRM, like the Salesforce platform) creates a single source of truth. You can analyze and take action on that data, delivering personalized content faster.

Salesforce Experience Cloud takes this a step further by enabling businesses to easily leverage data to build customized user interfaces and user experiences across websites, mobile apps, portals, and forums.

By bridging the gap between customer data and digital experience, Salesforce Experience Cloud helps marketers launch personalized and effective online engagements faster, and ultimately, build user trust and engagement.

In this guide, we'll share popular use cases for Salesforce Experience Cloud and benefits of this powerful online experience tool.

Our Salesforce Experience Cloud guide covers:

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Who is Salesforce Experience Cloud for? (Sample Use Cases)

Start by Setting the Salesforce Experience Cloud Strategy

Benefits of Choosing Salesforce Experience Cloud

Is Salesforce Experience Cloud Worth the Investment?

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What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

The new Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly known as Community Cloud) allows companies to easily build customized brand websites, mobile apps, portals, and forums.

Leveraging data stored in Salesforce, businesses can deliver customized content to customers and unique user groups.

What's the difference between Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Experience Cloud?

The new Experience Cloud advances the functionalities of the former Community Cloud by offering more dynamic and personalized journey for businesses to engage with various stakeholders.

Next, we dive into what types of businesses benefit from using Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Who is Salesforce Experience Cloud for?

For any business using Salesforce, the Experience Cloud is a flexible tool to connect with customers and partners by building interactive portals, customer service apps, and digital experiences.

Government, large and small businesses, retailers, and non-profits alike can customize Salesforce Experience Cloud experiences to be unique to their digital needs and help them achieve goals, like gaining new customers, or building loyalty with current customers and partners.

Ultimately, Salesforce Experience Cloud can be customized to modernize, streamline, and improve clunky processes and transform them online into simple portals, step-by-step interfaces, and intuitive customer engagements.

Unique Experience Cloud websites may include:

• ‍Customer support
  Example: an insurance claim portal - where customers can process insurance claims, access their healthcare information, schedule appointments, and purchase products from stores.

• ‍Sales channel acceleration
  Example: an auto partner portal – a dealership partner can create marketing budgets, streamline fund requests, process warranties and service claims, manage inventory, and make purchases on behalf of their customers.

• ‍Non-profit
  Example: a membership portal – where donors can assist with public outreach and branding, share events, connect with stakeholders, make donations, and track goals.

• ‍Education
  Example: a parent portal – where parents can submit school registration, track child progress, make payments, and view schedule and class enrollment.

• Storefront
  Example: a retail portal - where shoppers can update style preferences and sizing, browse inventory, personalize outfits, schedule a virtual fitting, make purchases, and access member discounts.

Start by Setting the Salesforce Experience Cloud Strategy

Ask yourself: what kind of digital experience is my brand looking to create? Whether it’s a customer service portal or a partner management solution - start by developing a strategy and user guideline.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but your team likely has lots of different ideas about the solution you need. Before jumping into design or development, your first step is to understand the specific problem that your digital experience needs to solve.

Work with your internal team to:

• Pinpoint digital goals and what needs to be achieved
• Talk to your current customers and web users to determine pain points they are currently experiencing
• Analyze data and website performance
• Set KPIs to measure success
• Achieve internal alignment and finalize strategy

Salesforce Experience Cloud Benefits

Generic Salesforce Platform reports and dashboards are just starting places.

With Salesforce customizations and Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can build the perfect workflow, portals, and customer experiences to mirror your internal processes, create efficiencies for your team, and improve your customers’ satisfaction.

Let’s take a look at the top benefits of using Salesforce Experience Cloud.  

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Plentiful Templates, Themes and No Code Options

Users and developers can create beautiful and engaging digital experiences with Experience Cloud that don’t require high-coding ability. A win for all, with no code, low code, and pro code tools – users can build and manage their site with the tools they have access to.

• No code: Businesses with limited assistance and technical experience can select premade templates, themes, and components
• Low code: Businesses looking to automate processes, create custom components and apps
• Pro code: Leave it to the experts for a complete customized experience with all the bells and whistles, like customized sites, portals, and integrations.

Building landing pages is very easy using the Experience Builder. For no code users, Salesforce provides out-of-the-box templates that allow drastic changes to be made to fit your brands style requirements.

Within the Builder users easily drag and drop content without writing a single line of code. Even though the builder is incredibly intuitive and user-friendly, it is also extremely robust and empowers users to customize components, page structures and settings.

‍Ease-Of-Use: ‍

Building a great customer experience isn’t about flash or surprise, it’s about making the process easy for your customers. Your Salesforce Experience Cloud user interface should be intuitive to use and convey clear value for your customers.

Take the time to consider every step of the customer journey or the path to take action. Can you reduce the number of steps, or add visual cues or messaging to guide the user? Can you proactively answer questions, put customers at ease, and set expectations, so users can act with confidence?

Users are more likely to come back and sing your praises when you make it easy to do business with you.

Reflects Your Brand: ‍

Whether it’s a website, mobile app, portal, or interactive dashboard, your digital experience should represent your brand and be recognizable at-a-glance.

Build a “brand voice” with a clear visual hierarchy, consistent color palette and fonts, strong, responsive graphics, clear copywriting, and other design elements that stretch Salesforce past its advertised capabilities.

A well-executed interface should act as an interactive extension of your brand and fit any user’s device like a cozy old pair of jeans.

‍Privacy and Security

As more business operations move online, privacy, data compliance, and security are paramount. Businesses are in safe hands with Salesforce.

Salesforce provides advanced security and strong protection against unauthorized access. All the data processing happens within Salesforce, instead of any third-party servers. 

‍Data Maximization

Integrate data from any Salesforce source: leads, opportunities, cases, campaigns, and custom objects or pull in data from third parties like social or legacy.

Having a single data hub makes it easy for your team to qualify incoming leads from your site, collaborate on files and update opportunities. On the flip side, customers accessing their account profiles and submitting changes helps you keep your database up-to-date.

Personalization

Build personalized experiences that increase onsite engagement: help your customers help themselves with access to a self-service portal allowing users to connect to other customers, share experiences with products, add reviews, and even suggest improvements – all in which create a satisfactory experience and deepen customer loyalty.

Design for every device: all digital experiences can be fully responsive and mobile optimized.

Optimization

When your site is live, you want to understand how users are interacting with it and how you can improve it.

Using the Dashboard and Moderation tiles in Experience Workspaces, you can supervise your content and track user data with reports and dashboards.

However, the analytics tools built on Experience Cloud are limited. To fully maintain the health of your site and deeply understand user interaction, we suggest implementing tools like Google Analytics (GA4) or other third-party scripts.

Is Salesforce Experience Cloud Worth the Investment?

Indeed, it is. With 24/7 access to customer data, the Salesforce Experience Cloud helps businesses provide their customers and partners a very personalized online experience, giving businesses an edge over their competitors.

Online experience is the key differentiator in today's competitive market. With Salesforce Experience Cloud, you're investing in a powerful online experience to satisfy customers, while empowering your internal teams with greater efficiency, data, and personalization capabilities.

Considering creating or upgrading a branded Salesforce Experience? You’ve come to the right place.

As a Salesforce Partner we bridge the gap between Salesforce advanced technologies and implementing digital experiences our clients want to provide its’ users. Let us help you make the most of your Salesforce Platform to grow your business.