A Comprehensive Guide To Getting Started With Salesforce Communities

In today’s ever-changing business environment, real relationships and direct interactions are the two cornerstones for business success. There is no denying that, with the rise of automation, customers want more personalized brand interaction and engagement to boost their business bottom line. This is where Salesforce communities come into the fray. 

With the Salesforce Community Cloud out-of-the-box capabilities, organizations can create branded and engaged online communities or information-sharing portals where users can connect and collaborate seamlessly in one single space.  The Community Cloud provides partners with a safe, secure environment to effectively manage leads and deals and collaborate with channel managers to uncover new opportunities and close more deals faster.

These Salesforce communities are productive ecosystems within a Salesforce organization, which can be easily built by leveraging Salesforce’s intuitive tools and ready-made templates. 

Success-driven organizations can rely on salesforce community development with Salesforce Community Cloud to meet any number of their business needs.  However, Salesforce communities come with three main types of communities. 

1. Customer communities – Customer communities provide employees and partners with more effective and streamlined communication channels to improve collaboration, and boost customer satisfaction. These communities operate as self-service portals that empower customers to get answers/responses to their queries via relevant articles, process documentation, FAQs, and discussions with other customers.
   
   
2. Employee communities – Employee Communities is a great platform that helps businesses provide effective ways for employees to collaborate and communicate either between departments or with one another.  These communities are internal websites that connect employees, providing them a single, branded space to share files, manage projects, and access critical company documentation.
   
   
3. Partner communities – Partner communities are defined as information hubs that allow resellers and sales teams to seamlessly collaborate and access important company data that result in closing more deals. Salesforce communities provide a robust platform that enables customers to engage with your organization and other customers via an online portal. 

From patient portals to higher ed student portals to government services portals, Salesforce communities offer a wide range of benefits designed to deliver a highly personalized customer experience. Regardless of its community type, Salesforce communities provide you with the branded space you need to reach all your business needs. Want to build highly-personalized Salesforce Communities to engage with customers, employees, and partners? Hire best Salesforce Communities Development experts now!

Key Benefits Of Salesforce Communities

1. Salesforce communities provide interactive and engaging experiences for customers, employees, or partners that result in end-to-end customer satisfaction and positively impact brand awareness. With the Salesforce community development, you can view questions and discussions to uncover customer pain points or areas to enhance your brand image.
   
   
2. Communities in Salesforce are intelligent spaces where users can easily seek out the needed information on their own. Moreover, customers can easily access FAQs, search the knowledge base, or pose questions to other community members. 
   
   
3. One of the biggest advantages of the Salesforce community is collaborative nature that empowers users to connect and collaborate in real-time, regardless of the location. It allows users to solve their problems and provide answers to each other’s questions.

If you’re looking to build beautifully branded, mobile-responsive portals where users can connect and collaborate, Salesforce communities emerged as an innovative solution to enable seamless collaboration and interaction between employees.

Templates in Salesforce Communities

1. Help Center – Community built by Help Center template provides your customers with a help portal to access any information they need. Customers can search for the info, read articles, and contact the support team to resolve any issues. 

2. Customer Account Portal– It is a full-fledged responsive portal where customers can access knowledge articles, view and updates their accounts, orders, creates and manage cases, etc. Additionally, this portal can be easily integrated with your third-party business processes.

3. Customer Service – You can craft a responsive community by leveraging this multi-functional template that lets members post questions, access relevant content and records, view articles, collaborate, and create support Cases.

4. Partner Central – By using the Partner Central template, you can build and grow a Partner Relationship Management solution that boosts digital adoption in your business with Lightning Components, preconfigured workflows, and data from any source to help partners sell faster and efficiently.

5. Aloha – This template can be used to build a configurable application launcher whenever the users in your company need to log in to multiple applications. This configurable app launcher lets your users quickly find and access applications using a single sign-on, including social logins, etc.

6. Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce – With this template, you can build a customized community by harnessing the power of standard Salesforce structure and tabs that can be fully customized using Visualforce.

7. Build Your Own – Create customized portals for your unique needs the way you want it. You can create personalized portals for your unique business needs with basic pages (including Home, Error, Search, and Login) and then include a full set of Lightning components. You can also add the pages, custom components, and themes to customize your portal further.

Steps To Enable Community In Salesforce

The steps to enable community in Salesforce are as follows:

Step 1: Go to setup -> Build -> Customize -> Communities. Click on settings. and check the enable communities’ checkbox and enter & save the domain name.

Note: Domain name cannot be changed once saved. This domain name will be used in all of the communities.

Step 2: New header will be enabled in the Salesforce org. Now, once communities are enabled, one can then switch between multiple communities.

Steps To Create Communities In Salesforce

Step 1: Go to setup -> Build -> Customize -> Communities -> Manage Communities -> & click on New communities’ button . Enter name, description and URL and click on the create button.

Steps To Manage Communities In Salesforce

Once a community is created, it is only visible to administrators until it is published or the URL is shared. Click on the edit button to manage the created community. 

• To add members to the community, the Members tab is used.

• Tabs & pages button manages the tabs that are available to the community and home page overriding with the VisualForce page.

• Branding button is used for adding header, footer, and for changing colors.

• Login Page button is used for adding a logo to the community and also login options for external users can be defined.

• Email button is used for specifying sender email notifications, chattering email branding & email templates.

• The miscellaneous button is used to flag content, enable private messages, and knowledgeable people on topics. After all the community settings are defined, the community can be published.

Final Wrap

Salesforce Communities offers you a wide variety of features that helps you stay connected with vendors, employees, and customers. This community platform redefines your organization’s processes and performance by combining a customer interaction platform with business processes to show customers the right and relevant information at the right time.

Are you looking to hire specialized services in Salesforce Communities development to transform your business? Reach out to Salesforce Communities Development experts at Cloud Analogy to propel your business forward by delivering a rich experience with the best Salesforce community development services. Hire Salesforce Community Cloud services from Cloud Analogy now!