Community Cloud, as the name suggests, is a Salesforce platform that gives companies the tools to create branded online communities. Through these communities, companies can open up communication and collaboration channels with customers, partners and employees like never before. There are 3 main use cases we will cover in this post.
Customer Service and Account Portals
This use case for Community Cloud is primarily for use between businesses and customers, specifically in the B2C sector. Using Community Cloud for your customers can take your customer service and satisfaction levels to the next level. Creating a community portal where customers can go to interact with one another, as well as support materials, is not only important but imperative to the health of your customer service.
Knowledge Hub - A Self Service Community
Creating a community knowledge hub is one of the main aims when using Community Cloud for customers. Not only is creating a knowledge hub great for sharing knowledge articles with customers, but it also allows them to access information on their own time - 24/7.
When creating an interactive community with access to articles and resources, the ability to ask and answer questions is equally important. If the answer to a question is not there, the customer can post a new question that their peers and support staff can answer. This results in fast responses. Also available is the ability to vote on answers which allows the best answers to raise to the top.
What happens if no one answers their question? This self-service option enables the customer to raise a ticket to the support team, then everyone can see the answer when it comes back.
As Salesforce says: “Help your customers help themselves”.
Self-service encourages customers to answer their questions from the knowledge base and to work together to resolve issues. Passionate customers become known as ‘experts’ in the community. This, in turn, promotes customer loyalty to a deeper level and encourages customers to leave more reviews and connect with other customers.
Recommendations
When getting started, Community Cloud automatically recommends people, groups and products for users to follow/connect/get involved with. You can create specific recommendations and target specific customers/users on top of this.
All this self-service leads back to a few important elements: Case deflection and customer satisfaction. Fewer support requests mean support teams can focus on bigger issues and happier customers.
Case Study
CoreHR is using Community Cloud for to assist the support efforts for their customers. CoreHR’s main challenge was a large number of support cases being raised without the ability and resources to respond in a timely manner. This, unfortunately, was leading to customer frustration.
Their main request was that users would need to step through articles and notifications before being able to raise cases. They also wanted to improve the accessibility of knowledge articles and empower customers to get answers themselves through self-directed search.
The Solution & Result: CoreHR required a seamless digital experience for their customers that matched the look and feel of their company’s branding. Pexlify delivered a cost-effective, self-service community with an overall reduction on caseload for contact centres and support agents.
Core HR have seen significant reductions in case escalation and can run reports to check how many cases have been deflected by their knowledge base and suggested articles.
Partner Relationship Management and Channel Sales
As we said in our last blog post, you can create Partner portals in Community cloud. Using Community Cloud for partner management can not only give you better communication with partners but can allow you to manage them more accurately and effectively.
Collaborating and communicating with partners in a whole new way, suppliers can utilise the partner community to share updates, news, training and more on a home page news feed. Partners can also raise issues to suppliers from within the community.
Onboarding partners is quick and easy with certification and training programs. Integrate any learning management platform right into the community.
Automation & Sharing
Sharing leads, opportunities, records and contracts with partners has never been so easy. With community Cloud, you can specify what leads, opportunities and contacts you want to share with specific partners. Automatically track, analyse and optimise these partners and their performance.
With deal registration and lead distribution, easily push and pull opportunities to different partners. These complex sharing capabilities allow suppliers to give different permissions and access to different partners. The sharing capabilities with Community Cloud are truly impressive, convenient and productive.
Integration and Upselling
Integrating third-party systems so that you can streamline inventory, pricing and more. Integrate with Mulesoft, Jitterbit, Jira and more.
Community Cloud is an excellent tool for upselling. Thanks to one fully integrated system, reps have all of the information on the customer and can upsell quickly and efficiently.
Case Study
Volkswagen Bank Ireland’s (VWBI) main challenge was to provide a solution that allowed them to easily manage and push sales and contract renewal Opportunities to the VWBI Dealer Network.
In order to allow the Dealer Network to access the community and manage their contract renewal opportunities, Merkle developed a custom Lightning Community for VWBI. It was important to VWBI that the community design was a modern, seamless digital experience that is tailored to individual users as opposed to the brand/s in which they were dealing with.
The Solution and Result:
We created a custom Salesforce Lightning Community for all dealerships working with VWBI to manage contract renewal Opportunities. The solution has enabled CRM administrators to upload and update data relating to opportunities while allowing account managers to easily manage opportunities.
VWBI uses a custom Salesforce Sales Cloud Solution, created by Merkle, to allow them to manage the Opportunities being pushed to the Dealer Network.
Merkle delivered on the business goals defined in the business case with 40+ dealer outlets on-boarded to partner community portal and dealer outlets now receiving prioritized opportunities from VWBI.
Employee Relationships - Build an Engaged Workforce
Communities for employees. Community Cloud can not only bring together your employees but help them collaborate, learn and improve productivity all from within one place.
Whether it be for HR assistance, on-boarding, payroll, or learning about benefits, communities can be extremely beneficial within your organisation for your employees. Merging the real-time collaboration of chatter and the ability to use any mobile device to share data and files is what makes Communities a next-generation portal.
Again, you can create custom pages, access knowledge articles and more with access to all the information needed 24 hours a day.
How can Community Cloud help you build an engaged workforce?
- Positioning & harmony in your company’s vision
- Involve & inform stakeholders
- Establish new ways of adding value
- Leverage best practices to improve community engagement and management
What results can you expect from using Community Cloud within your organisation?
- Raised engagement throughout your workforce
- Raise in HR productivity
- Lowered employee turnover rate
- Quicker onboarding for new employees
- Accelerated talent development
How Community Cloud has helped businesses improve internally:
Royal HaskoningDHV is using Community Cloud to share key insights and data promptly with stakeholders while on the go. This has reduced their decision-making processes from years to months. They plan to narrow down from weeks to days in the future.
Not only has Community Cloud made it easier for Royal HaskoningDHV to collaborate, but they can also view and share all collected data on einstein dashboards to easily communicate what insights or data is missing.
This results in building definitive and accurate dashboards. Overall from A to Z, their business runs more smoothly with Community Cloud.
“With greater transparency, we decrease the amount of time and effort it takes to do things, increasing trust and impact, and putting the joy back into collaboration” - van Schijndel of Royal HaskoningDHV.
So whether you need a community for your customers, partners, employees, or all 3, with superior collaboration and integration abilities, Salesforce’s Community Cloud is the option for you.