Item: Salesforce Experience Cloud
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Community Cloud

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to allow members to communicate with each other regarding upcoming events, current topics and develop future ideas. It allows our large user base the ability to interact with each other and increases their engagement and gives them more incentive to repeatedly visit our website and live the brand. We also use it internally to manage issues and maintain customer satisfaction within the call center and other departments. It facilitates issue management and communication across different teams in the organization.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It has a lot of features baked in that are ready to go out of the box which should satisfy most use cases.
It can be relatively easily customized to meet the individual needs of a company without giving too much ability to poorly build it.
Integrates well with the rest of an existing Salesforce org if you have one.
Users will already be familiar with the UI if they're using Salesforce for other reasons.

Cons

You need to build Visualforce pages for any functionality beyond the very standard stuff.
It doesn't have any "forum" style capability out of the box which is what we were looking to create.
Depending on how you want to use it, it could require a lot of extra user licenses which can cost money.
The cost of running community cloud when you consider where you want to grow the community could quickly grow.

Return on Investment

Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.

Alternatives Considered

Zendesk

We were already using Salesforce for other reasons so this was a natural choice. We didn't see any huge advantages in the other products so it just wasn't any reason to consider other products seriously. The pricing is reasonable too. Salesforce is really good about keeping you in the family with aggressive pricing and strong feature sets.

Performance

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.

Usability

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."

Ease of Integration

We don't have many external integrations but it does integrate well with our other Salesforce clouds since it's in the same ecosystem. We can report across objects and pull in customer satisfaction details from things like cases. In that sense, it integrates so well it ultimately really qualify as an integration anymore! It's nice that users can pull their own reports and find information without having to request it from a reporting team or IT resource. This really empowers them and enhances the "living in the system" objective.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think for most business Community Cloud serves a great purpose. You can use it for clients on an external-facing level for them to interact with each other and your business. It can also be used internally for employees to communicate with each other about records in Salesforce which really promotes living in the system and a real ecosystem feel rather than hopping around to chat or email. It is a great system of record too since those conversations are captured.

Comments

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Great Solution for Interaction with Customers and Within the Company