Salesforce is one of the most used customer relationship management (CRM) tool around the world. However, the market for a tool with only CRM option is limited. A business faces various problems and therefore needs solution as per the problem. The extra one always does the job of accurately predicting future problems. So, to grow business and simultaneously provide its customers, one stop solution for all the requirements, Salesforce has launched some series of add-in services and products to complement the main Salesforce CRM solution. One such add-ons is the Salesforce Community Cloud with all its benefits put together.
Some of these services became the stand-alone on their own for instance;
- The Marketing Cloud
- The Service Cloud
What is Salesforce Community Cloud?
To recognize the definition of community cloud, in a much better manner, it’s highly required to understand the need of it first. From the moment of its launch, it was intended to help the sales representatives to keep track of their work and the relationship with their customers. However, they indeed started to depend more on the customers and as well began the sharing of more stuff with the customers related to the business. But this entire process was not automated.
For instance, if a customer wanted to know how many kinds of products are there for choosing, the sales representative would have to download the product list from Salesforce and then sent it to the customer. Now, you can imagine if the company had a million customers and as well had to face a million requests a month. This issue needed to be solved with the process of granting access of your Salesforce data to the customers. Hence, leading to access the product list. Now the question was, ‘How to authenticate each customer?’ and most importantly, ‘How to give access to millions of customers without millions of users in SFDC?’
The real-time data was huge enough to create more complication within the entire system. At such a juncture stepped in the renowned Salesforce product, known as Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals. This was however later named as Salesforce Community Cloud. This product has enriched the Salesforce developers with an option to create a community of users, who can indeed access some specific objects or data in Salesforce. A good way to share information, as well as collaborate internally on projects or tasks, in a more personalized manner.
In fact, according to Salesforce, one can use communities to
- Drive an increased sale by connecting employees with distributors and suppliers
- Deliver authentic and world-class service by giving customers one single platform to communicate
- Managing the social listening, content, engagement, in one place
