Business innovation has moved at breakneck speeds over the past decade, and this pace has accelerated to unprecedented levels in the last 18 months. Small businesses, in particular, face increased shifts in consumer behavior, staffing, and business operations.
Agility and scalability are what small businesses need right now to ensure safe harbor. But most importantly, to stay competitive, they must provide an innovative digital experience to their customers and other key stakeholders. Salesforce Experience Cloud can deliver all three.
Features of Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud unites teams and stakeholders for one integrated experience online. We liken it to a portal — a portal backed by the power of the leading Salesforce platform. You can use it to connect with both customers and partners, depending on how you leverage its functionality and customize your use cases. Within your implementation, you can integrate data and files from any system. Multiple teams, units, or departments can work together to streamline operations.
Business Integration
Salesforce Experience Cloud harmonizes data from both internal legacy systems and third-party applications. You can pull in data from customers, partners, suppliers, and more to create customized feeds for your team members. With these insights, they can improve operations and streamline their workflows.
Engagement
Salesforce Experience Cloud delivers a unified brand experience to targeted audiences. The platform offers strategic functionality to encourage stakeholders to log in and contribute through customizable achievement badges and a publicly ranked leaderboard. Users can even endorse one another as area experts. Your small business can create brand leaders and therefore, an engaging brand experience.
Personalization
Small businesses can also benefit from personalization tools that foster online community, collaboration, and discussion. AI capabilities prompt content recommendations and suggest critical connections to bridge groups and connect thought leaders. A personalized feed delivers relevant content such as files, articles, and topics across communities or organizations. In this platform, users remain connected to the greater business world around them.
Management & Analytics
Community management tools ensure communities are healthy, vibrant, and focused. The platform’s dashboard delivers real-time, actionable, and insightful data and engagement metrics. This information helps community managers better understand the wants and needs of their community through adoption and engagement rates. It also identifies and promotes trending topics of community conversation.
Salesforce Experience Solutions
One of the major problems organizations face — especially in an era of increased remote work — is fostering a synchronized working culture that meets the operational, intellectual, and interpersonal needs of its people. Simply put: how do you maintain the camaraderie of an office when your team doesn’t interact at the water cooler every day?
Salesforce Experience Cloud acts as a hub for customers, employees, data, and files. It delivers a centralized, cloud-based gathering place for operations. You can streamline business processes by offering access to users anywhere they can connect — from desktops in the office (home or otherwise) to laptops in the conference room to mobile phones on the go.
Experience Cloud recently rebranded itself from “Community Cloud” and is creating opportunities for small businesses to create everything from mobile apps to help centers as part of new business experiences for staff, customers, and partners.
Customer Service
A popular implementation of Salesforce Experience Cloud is as a self-serve customer service solution. The platform empowers the customer during every stage of their customer journey, providing personalized and timely online resources. And because customers are in the driver’s seat, you need fewer CSRs and can focus the ones you have on more complex requests and issues. You can leverage a strategic yet automated help center and encourage self-service account management to streamline your customer service operations.
B2B Commerce
Online shopping has significantly ramped up in the last 18 months, and customers expect an engaging and performant retail experience. This isn’t easy to build from the ground up, but fortunately, Salesforce Experience Cloud serves as an excellent foundation to get you started. On the platform, customers can manage their own accounts and purchases, getting detailed order information and help from a strategic knowledge base. For small businesses, keeping customers happy is key, and with Salesforce, you can automate the process to keep operations lean without sacrificing top-tier service.
Human Resources
With a human resources landscape that’s shifting rapidly, recruiting talent is a high-stakes proposition. Anything that gives an organization an edge in attracting and vetting prospective hires is an essential value-add.
Your business can use optimized recruitment tools to streamline the often overwhelming and lengthy journey — for both the company and the interviewee. Throughout the interview process, you’ll want an all-inclusive platform tool with compatible software — instead of a mishmash of platforms.
You’ll then be able to transition new hires into an organization and use tracking tools to keep tabs on the progress of new team members. A compatible recruitment tool ensures an organization is hiring the best fit for the position and can ease the transition of new talent for optimal success.
Content Management
For small businesses hoping to scale content efforts, the Experience Cloud makes creating and sharing content more effortless than ever.
Easy content management begins with a centralized control room called CMS Workspaces. From there, users can create, manage and disseminate content to customers and prospects through various targeted channels.
This platform also simplifies collaboration across departments (think sales and marketing). It gives the option of out-of-the-box integrations with Pardot Email Builder, Marketing Content Builder, and Experience Builder.
Salesforce Customer 360
The ability to track customers while maintaining loyalty is also essential, especially when so many platforms, content, and processes are competing for the attention of your clients and employees. That’s where Salesforce Customer 360 comes into play.
Customer 360 unites all metrics within a business, from IT to sales to marketing. It creates a universal customer profile and ID to track journeys and share across departments in your organization.
You can protect your clients’ privacy and create a seamless encounter for your sales teams. In addition, you can segment your customers to manage and create a personalized brand experience.
Every department is working from the same set of analytics, creating cohesive insights for business development and customer engagement.
Implementing Your Salesforce Solutions
Soliant Consulting is a full-service Salesforce Partner delivering strategic business solutions and growth opportunities. We can guide you through creative platform implementations and strategic integrations to take your business to the next level. Our work ensures you have the infrastructure to run seamlessly and grow. Contact our Salesforce consulting team to learn more.
