Salesforce - Communities and their Advantages

What is Community?

          Communities are branded spaces for your employees, customers, and partners to connect. Communities are a great way to share information and collaborate with people outside your company who are key to your business processes, such as customers or partners.

Introduction

Social is now completely ingrained in business strategy, culture, process and communications, and having technology that allows customers and employees to participate in discussions across social channels is an essential part of today’s Marketing, Sales and Service business landscape.

With Salesforce Communities, now available in the Summer 13 release, organizations can build private social communities to better connect with customers, partners, product specialists and employees to learn, solve problems and share ideas.

Salesforce Communities offers:

ü  social collaboration for employees, customers, and partners

ü  deep integration with sales, service, and marketing business processes 

ü  multi-community access & custom branding and application development

ü  trusted security and scalability

What can I do with Salesforce Communities?

ü  Connect with Customers: Salesforce Communities will help social enterprises combine knowledge-driven, peer-assisted and agent-assisted customer service communities into a single unified experience giving customers better and faster service, every time. Companies will also be able to create a variety of marketing communities around events, campaigns or even spin up focus groups on the fly.

ü  Connect with Partners: Companies along with their partners, suppliers and distributors, can create custom communities to drive more sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaboration with the right experts.

ü  Connect with Any Community: Deploy communities to support any business process - from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

WHY DEPLOY A COMMUNITY?

Salesforce users should highly consider deploying Communities because they promote social collaboration for sales, service and marketing business processes. Specifically, Communities allow organizations to:

1. Build customer retention and loyalty by listening to customer needs

2. Reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction

3. Increase case deflection by empowering customers to help each other

4. Identify and promote brand advocates within your customer base

5. Turn conversations into knowledge and product ideas

6. Identify opportunities and team sell internally and with partners

7. Promote employee collaboration, innovation, productivity, and problem solving

This new addition to Salesforce is an improvement to Portals, offering all of the existing Portal functionalities in addition to new features, such as deeper customization and branding, easier navigation on mobile devices and dashboard access.

ADVANTAGES OF COMMUNITIES

How can you take advantage of Communities? New customers will acquire specific Community licensing with their subscription. For existing Portal customers, Salesforce.com has made it very easy to take advantage of communities. In switching to Communities, current Portal users can enable one free Community per existing Portal. Existing subscribers that choose to move to Communities have two flexible options:

Move Portal Licenses to Communities: move existing portal licenses and user profiles to a new Community and utilize all current features. Portal and Community can run in parallel which you test your Community.

Swap for Community Licenses: Portal users can enable Communities to replace existing Portals. In order for Communities to receive functionality updates as they become available, current Portal users will need to move completely to the Communities product.

  

Here are five benefits of connecting with customers through communities:

1. Save Time

By creating a community platform for customers to share, you give your customers access to not only your knowledge base, but other community member’s thoughts, as well as those of your employees and partners, offering the ability to combine your existing resources with crowd sourcing tips for much faster customer service outcomes.

2. Save Money 

By connecting your customers to other highly engaged customers, you’ll decrease the amount of tough questions coming into your customer service center. Customers will answer each other’s questions. Every call not connected to a live agent is a penny saved.

3. Enhance Products 

Include product developers with engaged customers for product ideation, feedback and beta testing. 

4. Strengthen Loyalty

By having a stronger connection to your customers’ likes, wants, and purchase histories, you can tailor future product offerings and content to them. Getting that first sale is one thing, keeping them coming back as a matter of brand loyalty; that takes work. 

5. Drive Sales           

Being connected is about switching from offering services to offering solutions.  A stronger connection with a potential customer involves knowing more about them, their wants, their needs, their past purchases, their likely next purchases. You’ll be offering them solutions tailor-made to their needs so closing deals is more frequent.