Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Website Toolbox

HR and Employee Self-Service Portals: Organizations using Salesforce Experience Cloud can leverage Salesforce CMS to create centralized knowledge hubs for HR policies, onboarding resources, and internal communications. Employees can access up-to-date content without IT involvement, improving efficiency and reducing HR’s administrative burden. Multi-Channel Content Distribution: Businesses needing to push content across different touchpoints (web, mobile, email, and customer portals) benefit from Salesforce CMS’s ability to deliver consistent messaging seamlessly. A sales enablement team can publish case studies and product updates on a customer portal while simultaneously integrating content into marketing emails. Personalized & Dynamic Content: Companies using Salesforce CRM can leverage Salesforce CMS to deliver AI-driven, tailored content based on user behavior, preferences, or past interactions. For example, a recruiting team can show custom job recommendations based on a candidate’s past applications.

Incentivized

Website Toolbox is a huge improvement over self-hosted forums. It attempts to host forums that failed over the effort required to keep these free of spam.

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

Incentivized

• Fights spam.
• Prevent fake accounts.
• Keep forums clean by requiring post approval.

• 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

• Customization of JavaScript/CSS.
• Billing notifications.

Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm

Incentivized

It's very easy to train users on this, even external facing customers. Our users were already familiar with Salesforce user interface since we use the platform for other reasons. We built custom Visualforce pages with a simple, clean layout so we didn't need to train customers. That's ultimately the goal for external facing stuff, that we don't need to train them; they just "get it."

Incentivized

Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.

Incentivized

Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.

Incentivized

Support is rarely needed. When needed, they are friendly and fast to understand and address the problem.

Yeah, so we've utilized a few different evaluations of products. Most of them are website or WordPress base, intranet, hidden backend applications. It's just because all the data we have already and we have multiple experience clouds, it allows us to leverage SSO or single sign-on approach across of our experience cloud. So it's less because all one platform, it's less complex for the end user and less confusing.

Incentivized

• Before using Salesforce, different teams managed content separately, leading to duplication and inconsistencies.
• Using Salesforce within Experience Cloud, we have improved our customer service portal, reducing ticket volume.
• Our sales team can access and share content directly from Salesforce without searching external folders.

Incentivized

• It has improved our self-service customer support.