Salesforce Communities: What you need to know!

With this article, I’m sharing with you everything you need to learn about Salesforce Communities. From what you can do with them to some of its most common examples, I’m also providing you a brief walkthrough for a new community setup. Then, you can start your own right away!

Let’s start with the basics: Salesforce Communities is a communication tool. We can say that Communities are a common ground for (at least) two audiences to communicate, share and collaborate within a business. Taking its purpose in mind, every Community can integrate whoever you want – whether they are Customers, Partners or Employees – and allows you to set its own goals, requirements and KPIs.

Here’s the brief:

• Why do we want Salesforce Communities?
• What types of Salesforce Communities are there and what can we do with them?
• How to properly set up a community?

Why do we want Salesforce Communities?

If you have a business, you want to make the best out of it right? Right!

Do you keep hearing that customers are more and more demanding, and businesses need to reinvent themselves to find new ways of getting to these customers and bring innovation? Probably, yes.

So, Salesforce Communities is just another way to leverage all you have already built and make it better, faster, and smoother. Customers like to have things easily accessible at the distance of a click, and we like it too.

With Salesforce Communities we can extend business processes to Customers and Partners, we can share with them subsets of data and features from our internal Salesforce org, or we can integrate data from 3^rd party systems, allowing us to share and see relevant information in one shared place, bringing people closer and increasing the potential to share ideas, and discussions as well as solutions.

Using the right strategies, features, and KPIs in place, we can aim for increased Customer Satisfaction, Customer/Employee Loyalty, scale Service without scaling costs, increase channel sales, reduce Support costs, measure Partner performance, or boost employee productivity, and those are only some of the many goals a company sets for success and sustainability.

The strategy behind building a Community should not be an IT department decision alone, of what technology to use – it should be part of the company’s vision and strategy, with Commercial and Marketing teams, Finance, and HR departments involved. Salesforce Communities have the potential to bring benefit to all sides of a business, and defining the objectives and KPIs for a Community upfront is key.

What types of Salesforce Communities are there and what can we do with them?

As said before, there are different types of Salesforce Communities, each one with its own valid objectives and benefits.

If you decide to create a Community, Salesforce provides you with some pre-established Templates, that reflect the most common and relevant types of Communities in the market across all businesses. That just makes it easier for you to start!

I’ll go into a bit more detail on the most commonly used ones, in terms of what are their objectives and key benefits, no matter which type of business we talk about.

Customer Account Portal

This is a great Community to further connect with your Customers, take communication and interaction with them to another level, by giving them a self-serve, direct channel to:

• Securely access and update relevant information to them, such as Account and Contract information
• Create and manage cases, getting quick updates and a direct communication channel
• Search on your Knowledge base for articles, and answers to their FAQ’s
• Reach to Support Agents and Peers to discuss and share thoughts and ideas
• Access to all relevant customer data in one single place by integrating with 3^rd party systems

By allowing for such features, we are actually able to transfer some of the responsibility to your customers, allowing them to find solutions to their issues with minimal effort and interaction with account managers or support agents.

The key benefits of such a Community are an improved customer relationship and decreased support costs.

Customer Service

The focus of a Customer Service Community is not so much on allowing Customers to update their own relevant Account data, but on providing a powerful tool for Customer Support with self-service features to:

• Create and manage cases, getting quick updates and a direct communication channel
• Search on your Knowledge base for articles, and answers to their FAQ’s
• Post questions to the community
• Collaborate with Support Agents and Peers to discuss and share thoughts and ideas
• Organize and access content by topics, as well as the suggestion of topic related articles
• Automatically escalate important cases

This type of Community can truly empower your Customers to find the solutions they are looking for through organized, suggested content. Consequently, your company benefits from an improved case deflection ratio and happier Customers.

Partner Central

The Partner Central is the perfect template when you want to work with Partners to extend your sales force, channels, and network, by enabling a flexible template that allows you to:

• Adjust your Partner management processes and grow your Partner relationship and solutions with preconfigured Channel Sales workflows and data integration from different sources;
• Give your Partners access to register and manage deals up to closure directly in your Salesforce;
• Configure lead distribution and channel marketing, directing and forwarding the right leads or content to the right people;
• Share Knowledge content, training, and sales materials with your Partners in a common space for a consistent, seamless, and accelerated Sales process;
• Get an integrated and immediate report of all your pipeline, from all channels, including your Partners, as well as providing your Partners with reporting and dashboard capabilities for deeper analytics of their selling.

With Partner Central you can sell faster, smarter, and more effectively, growing your and your Partners’ business by increasing your presence in the market through different channels and an extended Sales team, collaborating on opportunities and deals with your Partners, and working with analytics to continue to adjust and improve.

Other templates:

• Help Center – Give your customers the answers they’re looking for by allowing them to search, suggest and read articles before raising support requests.
• Aloha – This allows you to build a configurable App Launcher to quickly access third-party and Salesforce-connected applications using single sign-on authentication, including social logins.
• Build Your Own – Provides basic pages and allows you to add more pages and create customized solutions for your unique needs that require extra flexibility.
• Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce – Build a custom community using standard Salesforce structure and tabs that can be fully customized, supporting most standard objects, custom objects, and Salesforce Mobile App. Please note this isn’t a Lightning-based template and won’t work with Experience Builder.

How to properly set up a Community?

So, now I will walk you through how to set your Community up for success.

1. Define your Objectives and Requirements

Before you jump into making a decision on what type of Community you will have and how to set it up, you need to define what you are looking for.

What are your business’ pain points today? How do you want to expand and innovate beyond what you have today? What are the requirements to achieve that? How will you measure success and adoption, what will be the KPIs to measure? What people do you want to serve and what people will contribute to it? What resources do you have available?

These are all key questions that once you answer, the following steps and decisions will become a lot easier to make.

2. Create your Community and choose a template

Some pre-steps before actually creating the Community:

1. Enable Communities in Community Settings in your Salesforce org. You’ll need to define a Domain name and check its availability.
2. Set up Salesforce Knowledge. Having a Community without Knowledge enabled is just a waste. Knowledge allows you to create and manage articles with relevant information and securely share them. This can help assist Customers or Partners with the information they are looking for, allowing for more autonomy and less support required, and potentially fewer issues being raised.
   1. Enable Knowledge, define your Data Categories and define your system permissions of who should be able to view, create, manage or archive articles. You can also enable Topics which is a way to further classify and organize content.

Create your Community:

1. Now that you have enabled Salesforce Communities, from Setup, go to All Communities and click ‘New Community’.
2. Choose from one of the Community Templates available or ‘Build Your Own’ and define a Name for your Community.
3. From the Administration tile in the Community Workspaces, click ‘Members’ and select the Profiles that should have access to the Community.
4. Still from the Administration menu, you can go to ‘Preferences’ and make some adjustments to the overall community settings such as: allow members to flag content or to upvote/downvote, enable reputation levels, give access to API requests on Chatter, or suggest topics on new posts

3. Define and create your Community’s Branding

Branding can be defined in various levels of a Community, from the Login page to the actual Community pages, by using the company’s official color palette and logo.

1. From the Administration menu, now go to ‘Login & Registration’, select a Logo and a Footer text so that the Login page shown to users is branded. You can also customize the right-side frame with a branded URL.
2. At the Experience Builder, on the Theme menu, go to Images and upload a Company Logo, Header Image, and a Background Image for the Login Page.
3. Also from Experience Builder, on Settings, you can define an image for your Featured Topics (if you have any – see next step around Topics).

4. Navigation Menu and Topics

As mentioned before in point 2, Topics are a great way to classify and organize content, which can then be used to create suggestions and shortcuts for your Community Members, giving them quick ways to find what they are looking for.

1. From the Administration menu, go to ‘Content Management’, then under the ‘Topics’ tab you can
   1. Define which Topics should appear as Navigational Topics – these will be listed from the Menu available on the Community pages.
   2. Specify which should be Featured Topics – these will be displayed and standing out on the home page to highlight frequent or key topics.

You can add images to each Topic by editing the Topic, and you can also add Topics to Articles by editing the Article so that it is easier to find relevant information.

5. Refine your content using Page Variations and Audiences

Page variations allow you to create different views and experiences of a page for different audiences so that we show only relevant content to each set group of people.

Create Page Variations:

1. From Experience Builder, at the top left corner click the Gear icon next to Home, and then Page Variations.
2. On the Page you wish to create a variation, click on the drop-down on the right and select Duplicate if you wish to clone from the original page and customize how you need.

Setting up Audiences and assigning to Pages:

1. From the Page Variations menu, next to the New Page Variation button click the People icon to Manage Audiences.
2. Click New Audience – define the Name of the Audience and the Criteria that will identify the people to include in the Audience.
3. On the Page Variations menu, click the drop-down on the right of the Page you want to assign the Audience, and click Assign.
4. Select the Audience that should see the Page and Save.

Page Variations are typically used when there are quite some differences on the page we want to show to the different audiences.

However, if the differences are few, and only very few components of the page you want to affect to different audiences, you can keep it to one single Page and adjust the Component properties instead.

1. On the Page editor, click on the Component (you will get the Component property editor on the side).
2. Click the drop-down on the Component property editor and then click Assign.
3. Select the Audience that should see the Component and Save.

6. Engage with Reputation Levels

Reputation Levels are a great way to engage your Community Members and leverage participation and sharing within the Community, by rewarding members with points on specific actions such as answering a question or sharing a post.

1. From the Administration menu, go to ‘Preferences’ and tick ‘Enable setup and display of reputation levels’. Once you save the changes you will then see two new items under the Administration menu: Reputation Levels and Reputation Points.
2. Click Reputation Levels, and define a Name and a Point Range for how many levels you wish to have (by default you get 10 levels to configure, but you can add or remove levels as required).
3. Go to Reputation Points, and define how many points each action will contribute with.

7. Publish

Now that you went through all the key steps to set up your Community, it is time to Publish and Activate it so it becomes up and running, available to your community members.

From Experience Builder click Publish, and then from Workspaces, go to Administration and click Activate Community.

You are now ready for an amazing journey to improve and grow your business!

I hope you have enjoyed this post! Subscribe to Stellaxius Knowledge Center and do not miss our articles on technology, CRM, and of course, Salesforce! 🙂