Item: Salesforce Experience Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Pedro Henrique de Almeida

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Community Cloud

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a Salesforce consultancy company, we implement, customize and support the whole portfolio of Salesforce products including Community Cloud. We've been able to successfully deliver Community Cloud based solutions that range from a simple portal that convert user data from a contact form into a lead within Sales Cloud to a complete portal where salesman are capable of tracking the whole lifecycle of a initial lead coming from multiple sources to a conversion to opportunity, all within Community Cloud with data synchronized to the main Sales Cloud.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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

Cons

Initial configuration can be quite overwhelming for unexperienced users due to the large number of customization options
As a SaaS solution, speed and stability might present surprises as it's not directly under the control of the system manager

Return on Investment

Community Cloud had a great impact so far since we've been able to expand our catalog of solutions so we can deliver a complete integrated portal to our customers without requiring an external and costlier alternative.

Alternatives Considered

Before Community Cloud, a common alternative was the development of web sites externally with integration to Sales Cloud being made from external API calls. This is a far costlier and more complex endeavour since it requires a dedicated development team to create and maintain this web site and a team capable of creating the integration between the systems from scratch.

Support Rating

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Salesforce Experience Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Salesforce Experience Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce Experience Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Salesforce Experience Cloud go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Salesforce Experience Cloud again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Salesforce Advertising Studio (formerly social.com), Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Einstein Analytics (formerly Wave Analytics)

Likelihood to Recommend

Community Cloud is the perfect tool for people that are looking for a solution where they can create a web portal that is integrated with their existing Salesforce data and want to make some of that data available and interactable for people that doesn't really require a Salesforce user license, whether they are customers, employees or the general public. As a standalone product without integration to the Salesforce ecosystem, it really doesn't make sense as a regular web portal presents itself as a better option.

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Community Cloud from an implementation perspective