Delivering Value to Your Stakeholders with the Salesforce Experience Cloud

The past year has seen an accelerated digitization of the world that has fundamentally shifted the way customers and partners interact with companies online. Gone are the days when people looked to the internet simply for quicker access to information — now, people are signing on with the expectation of a full experience.

Salesforce launched Experience Cloud last fall as the latest iteration of Salesforce Communities. The name change reflects the enhanced capabilities the platform provides. Today, online presence is more than community building (although that’s still important), and Experience Cloud enables a holistically centralized online presence.

Companies using Experience Cloud can manage all of their data in one place and use it to create an interactive and personalized customer experience with interactive sites, portals, forums, and mobile applications. 

Let’s take a deeper look into how you can create a high-value, engaging stakeholder experience using Experience Cloud.

Quick Takeaways

  • The accelerated digitization of the world over the past year has required companies to provide engaging online experiences for customers and partners
  • The emergence of the cloud and open data has created an overload of information online, leaving companies with the challenge of making things personal for users
  • Consumers can recognize run-of-the-mill templates when they see them; digital experiences should be organized and efficient but also unique to the company and audience
  • Partnerships are central to organizational success and while efficiency is key, partners are a constituent group that also requires personalization

Data-Driven, Personalized Strategy

The emergence of the cloud and subsequent migration of companies in every industry toward cloud-based operations (especially over the past year) has led to more standardized processes that have increased organizational efficiency and created faster response times in customer interactions.

At the same time, the increased integration of data into most functional areas has led to an information overload. With so much information available in one place, how can we still create experiences that feel personal?

Enter Experience Cloud. The platform is built to not only house data but use it to understand your user’s persona and place in the customer journey, then tailor their experience by providing the content and support most relevant to them.

Take support service as an example. Customer support teams are often overwhelmed with inquiries and customers can quickly become frustrated with long wait times or automated support systems that are clunky and lack personalization. The information customers need might be there, but if it’s difficult and inconvenient to find, customers are left dissatisfied.

With Experience Cloud, companies can create searchable knowledge bases where customers can find information on their own while also utilizing forum-based support communities that leverage expert consumers to provide peer-to-peer support. Now, the customer support journey has become accessible and interactive.

This unburdens support teams so they can focus on more complex customer inquiries and continues refinement of Experience Cloud support resources.

Since Experience Cloud also fully integrates with your Salesforce CRM system, customers and partners accessing portals to find information and collaborate on projects will also have a customized experience.

Experience Cloud portals utilize CRM data to provide users with personalized feeds that prioritize relevant content based on persona and user history, and recommend groups and communities that align with their interests and needs.

Unique Infrastructure

Experience Cloud has ready-to-go templates that make it easy for companies to launch their websites, portals, and forums for customer use. But consumers are digitally savvy these days, and they can spot an overused template when they see one.

Companies can customize Experience Cloud templates in ways that make their digital presence unique, but they can also build what they need from scratch to provide the exact user experience their customers are looking for.

Depending on company needs, Experience Cloud portals and websites can prioritize the types of experiences that matter to your stakeholders: online storefronts, community forums, events, file and document access, news and information — or any combination.

Partnerships Prioritized

Efficient partnerships ultimately make your organization better, but it shouldn’t stop there. Partners are still a constituent group that requires a personalized experience to make the relationship work. With this in mind, Experience Cloud offers portal templates and services specifically meant for partners.

Partner portals provide the same level of data-driven personalization as those made for customers; partners get access to the product, sales, and company information they need to collaborate effectively.

Perhaps most importantly, Experience Cloud provides tools to centralize and systematize onboarding, training, certification, and support that eliminates typically time consuming processes while giving partners 24/7 access to resources they may need.

Putting it All Together

One of the challenges companies encounter when seeking solutions for providing digital customer experiences is the ability to keep everything in one place.

For this reason, Experience Cloud not only offers the comprehensive capabilities they do for engaging with multiple stakeholder groups, they allow for integration of legacy and third-party systems and data that centralizes all of your data and digital tools.

Customers and partners don’t want to have to visit multiple websites or create more than one account to interact with your organization; Experience Cloud eliminates this problem and makes for seamless stakeholder engagement.

Ready to create the best digital experience for your audiences?

Rainmaker can help your company strategize, build, and implement an optimal digital experience via Experience Cloud for your customers and partners. Drop us a line to learn more!