Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Sitecore Experience Manager

Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.

Incentivized

Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].

Incentivized

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
• The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
• The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.

Incentivized

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

Incentivized

• Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
• You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
• Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.

Incentivized

Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.

Incentivized

It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.

Incentivized

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.

Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.

Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.

I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.

Incentivized

The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.

• Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
• Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
• Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data

Incentivized

• ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
• Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
• "Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
• If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.

Incentivized