Within the retail industry, particularly the B2B sphere, ease of access to support and information is essential for businesses aiming to fight churn and increase their average revenue per user (ARPU) figure.
On top of this customer expectations have shifted in recent years. Customers expect a personalized experience when interacting with brands that takes into account their engagement platform of choice and reflects their unique circumstances.
Businesses are under increasing pressure to provide exceptional experiences, not just to their customers, but to their commercial partners and employees.
Salesforce Experience Cloud has the features and functionality that allow businesses to achieve these three objectives at the same time from a single interface. Take a closer look at Experience Cloud and what it offers for businesses looking to provide immaculate digital experiences.
What is Experience Cloud?
Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly “Community Cloud”) is a platform that allows businesses to engage and collaborate with any audience – from customers to employees – by custom creating sites, forums and apps from a single platform.
It offers branded, customized spaces for your employees, customers and partners to connect with your business and with each other, using the functions and capabilities inherent to Salesforce.
Experience Cloud provides a space for sharing knowledge, answering questions, lead sharing, case management, employee engagement and collaboration, among other services.
Why Do Businesses Need Experience Cloud?
Experience Cloud’s features allow businesses to offer clients and customers an exceptional customer experience and a robust customer support system at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
On top of this EC makes collaboration and sharing of lead and marketing data with partners a simple, instant process. Employees can also collaborate more easily via the cloud and work on collective projects. With help from Experience Cloud, businesses can:
Reduce churn
An essential step to reducing churn and increasing monthly recurring revenue is ongoing engagement with customers and clients. Experience Cloud gives businesses the portal in which to do this, allowing customers to interact with real-time data and with support channels that can be configured to appear only to segmented audiences who access your portals.
Help customers find their own solutions
Increase customer case deflection and customer engagement through Experience Cloud. Acting as a self-help support tool, customers and partners can search your portal for answers to questions, solutions to problems and source help from other active community users. Watch your customer satisfaction increase and your service metrics improve, such as increased first-contact resolutions and lower support call and chat volumes.
Engage remote work employees
With many employees still working at least partially remotely, having a cloud-based space that allows for collaboration and sharing of information is vital. Through Experience Cloud, employees can connect and share data, work on projects and connect with other business departments.
Manage partners more efficiently
Experience Cloud is a powerful tool for managing partner relationships. Using a site built on Experience Cloud, you can invite partners and share CRM data with them to drive the sales and marketing process. Create and share leads with partners and onboard and support new partners with ease using pre-built features in your EC portal.
Simplify app development
Using EC, you’re able to create not just websites, portals and forums, but your own app too. Using out-of-the-box templates and functionality, you can create an internal app for your business with customised functionality, without requiring the coding skills necessary to build an external app from scratch.
Create commerce channels
For businesses that offer retail experiences to customers, Experience Cloud enables them to build commerce portals for their online stores solely focused on customer sales and transactions in the online sphere.
3 Standout Features of Experience Cloud
Experience Builder
To create any experience on Experience Cloud whether it’s a website, commerce portal, self-service portal, community forum or partner portal, you first need to choose an appropriate template in Experience Builder.
The templates are pre-built meaning they don’t require any coding or customization, however, you can customize your template as you like simply by adding or removing specifications with a few clicks. It’s also possible to add and customize web pages, alter colour schemes and preview how your site or portal looks on mobile devices.
Third-party app integration
Because Experience Cloud exists on the Salesforce Platform, you’re able to develop and extend your site’s functionality and capabilities using apps from Salesforce’s existing library of partner-based third-party apps to make the user experience on your site or portal even more seamless.
Personalisation
Create a personalized customer experience for every user by creating and segmenting your audience. Control what view and information each audience sees every time they view your site, app, forum or portal.
With help from Experience Builder, you can create and set up multiple experiences for a single site and create certain toolbars, menus, pages and components depending on what you would like each audience to see.
As a business, your ROI for Experience Cloud is only as high as your grasp of its functionality, features and capabilities. For this reason, most businesses choose to work with an experienced Salesforce partner who ensures a seamless cross-departmental rollout and facilitation of Experience Cloud.
CloudSmiths is South Africa’s largest Salesforce implementation partner and trusted advisor. We offer end-to-end Salesforce services including consultation, implementation, development and support services, helping businesses maximize their Salesforce ROI and drive ongoing revenue growth.
