According to the Builtwith.com report, Salesforce Experience Cloud powers up help centers, customer service portals, and partner communities of over 2,000 businesses. Since its first release in 2014, Experience Cloud has revolutionized the portal technology of companies like Glassdoor, Poshmark, and Goodreads, with over 10 million website visits per month and 50 million active community members.
In our blog post, we’ll explain:
Salesforce Experience Cloud is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses link clients, partners, and employees to securely exchange information and documents. This portal software allows users to share data in real time and on any mobile device.
Experience Cloud empowers companies to create communities for customers and:
Besides that, within the Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can connect external partners or independent agents. Experience Cloud is the Salesforce digital experience platform (DXP) built on the Customer 360 platform. It ensures seamless integration with any solution in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Thanks to its flexibility, Experience Cloud can be integrated with a website, a Salesforce product ( for example, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Slack ), or a third-party system. As a result, it makes data flow much more centralized and increases productivity.
One of the common questions regarding Experience Cloud is, “Is Salesforce Experience Cloud the same as Communities?”. In short, “Yes.” In 2010, Salesforce launched a brand-new product for efficient collaboration within the platform called “Chatter.”
And only four years later, the company created a full-fledged product suite – Community Cloud – that housed functionality to build portals (formerly Salesforce Portals), websites, and knowledge centers, which already included Chatter.
Later, in 2021, Salesforce renamed Community Cloud to Experience Cloud. It highlighted that it had outgrown the concept of “a platform for communities” and now focuses on creating a better digital experience.
According to the Salesforce report, Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation can increase customer satisfaction by 32%. Besides that, this product suite helps:
All this can be achieved with comprehensive Experience Cloud functionality. So, what will you find within it?
This feature set allows for creating individually customized user experiences by utilizing CRM data to power specific workflows and information from any source.
Experience Cloud enables the creation of a unified knowledge depository by publishing articles for customers and agents.
The powerful and flexible Salesforce Experience Cloud architecture offers the highest level of security and control over client and user roles, administrative rights, and data-sharing models. Besides, you’ll be able to see real-time platform performance and health information.
This product module streamlines placing, management, and support of the entire case lifecycle from a single system which positively reflects on improving partner and customer productivity.
With the Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can guide your customers step by step through any business process. Besides, Lightening Flow Automation will save time on onboarding, recruiting, and task automation.
The whole Salesforce ecosystem places a high focus on data protection. Experience Cloud enables the creation of roles and permission sets that determine which users have access to which data. It streamlines the sharing of documents with customers and partners and facilitates collaboration.
With Experience Builder, you can revamp the entire design of the portals and build a new digital experience using pre-built or custom components.
Experience Workspaces help you centralize digital experience management, moderation, content management, and administration. Companies can measure, analyze, and optimize their experiences with customizable dashboards.
You can create and store native content without leaving the Salesforce platform.
Once the content is created, you can structure it around topics and show your audience the most recent recommendations. These recommendations can be based on popularity, age, and featured content they can follow or subscribe to.
With dashboards in the Community Management Console, you can see how your clients are engaged with the community. You can analyze this data to understand your community better and improve your service.
We’ve helped multiple small businesses and large companies optimize Salesforce and adapt it to their teams’ needs .
General Salesforce Experience Cloud features allow building digital help centers, portals, microsites, and landing pages. But it wouldn’t be Salesforce if it didn’t provide some space for imagination and for creating unique solutions. Further, we’ll discuss what you can do with this platform and how its features can be applied to different industries.
| Property managers can build virtual service centers for handling property maintenance requests. | |
| Businesses can build an eCommers platform for buying products from stores, sharing feedback, warranty processing. | |
| Companies involved into agricultural business can build a centralized platform for managing sellers, investors, and growers. Food companies can nurture their relationships with distributors. |
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| You can create an internal online knowledge base for HR, IT, and other departments | |
| Commercial real estate brokers can announce about upcoming webinars or conferences on landing pages | |
| Land brokers can turn Experience Cloud portals into detailed land listings, which can be integrated with a website, map services, chats, or online forms. |
Help Centers allow customers to get the answer immediately via forums, self-service portals, or knowledge bases. In addition, you can easily personalize the system interface by customizing the template in Experience Builder. You can use your company branding style or select a pre-set theme that fits your brand style.
For example, property managers can turn Experience Cloud into virtual service centers. There they can handle property service requests and answer all questions regarding property maintenance. Besides that, they can exchange and store client documents and manage all legal processes.
Within Experience Cloud, you can build a user-friendly portal. In the portal, users can view content, update their profiles, and manage cases and claims. Your customers will receive direct access to data and processes to access information and complete any action.
With the help of Experience Cloud, you can create loyal communities and reward champion users who help other customers in the community. For example, eCommerce customers can leverage the platform to:
You can create an effective solution for channel management of your partner collaboration. Create training and certification programs that track partner progress. Partners can:
For example, companies can easily manage large volumes of investors and growers in agriculture via a centralized digital space. They can organize secure collaboration and financial file sharing via Chatter chats or Slack channels.
Transparency in communication helps to reach different groups with a more personalized message, trace the communication history in one place, and resolve all issues as soon as they arise. Moreover, employees can get real-time notifications when the lead is converted, identify patterns in scenarios, and customize the whole sales path accordingly.
You can automatically educate partners by suggesting the necessary content and files with the help of Einstein AI.
Through a portal, brokers can access product information or specific training and certification courses to level their product knowledge. In the example of Pernod Ricard, a famous beverage company, Experience Cloud became a perfect solution for collaboration with liquor distributors. It also helped them build separate communities for their brands’ consumers, with each group’s authentic spirit.
Such digital space encourages teamwork and helps streamline work procedures, primarily if your teams work remotely. In portals, you can group units based on project goals or events. Experience Cloud helps optimize data and document exchange by giving access only to those who work with it. So, employees can share and work together on files without the risk of them becoming corrupted.
If you want a single source of knowledge for HR, IT, and other departments, you can create an FAQ portal or help center. Your company can store all the guides and troubleshooting material there, which your employees can use precisely when necessary.
You can create appealing microsites and landing pages to generate leads for a new product launch, an upcoming event, and more. For example, commercial real estate companies can organize webinars or conferences and announce them on landing pages to further share them with all the partners.
And the icing on the cake is Salesforce’s almost unlimited customization capabilities that go far beyond pre-built features. For example, land brokers can turn Experience Cloud portals into detailed listings, which can be integrated with a website, map services, chats, or online forms.
So, land buyers can, for example, look at all the available options by sorting them by Zip Code and seeing all those within a radius. Also, agents can enhance it with a branded and user-friendly design, add necessary fields, and collaborate with clients within the systems. With a single data source, brokers can adjust the sales pipeline depending on multiple criteria, such as price, location, and purpose.
Further, they can personalize the offer for particular customers and engage them by sending them the most relevant content or resource with the proposal. Salesforce Experience Cloud can adapt to any industry need, which makes it a market leader in portal software. However, if you have little technical experience driving such projects, it’s better to delegate it to real professionals like Ascendix.
We have 20+ years of practical experience in turning clients’ ideas into effective Salesforce solutions. Since we’ve worked closely with key Salesforce Clouds almost since their inception, we know all platform intricacies inside out and their evolution capabilities.
Add to this our in-depth expertise in custom software development for PropTech and CRE Tech, and you can be sure that you’ll hire the best Salesforce Experience Cloud consultant.
We’ll make Salesforce work to your benefit regardless of whether you need to set up and optimize the default Experience Cloud functionality or design a unique solution. We have 200+ certified Salesforce consultants, developers, solution architects, business analysts, and QA professionals on board that will ensure the seamless operation of your platform. Discover more Salesforce services we can provide.
Now, let’s talk about the most interesting part – Salesforce Experience Cloud license types and their cost. The good news is that if you are an experienced Salesforce user or have an in-house expert who can set it up, you will pay only for the number of licenses. Unlike many software vendors, Salesforce doesn’t collect setup fees from new users, so the cost structures are transparent.
However, suppose you need to adjust this Cloud to your unique requirements but don’t have any internal expertise. In that case, you may need to hire a Salesforce Experience Cloud implementation consultant. As a result, you will need to pay for subscriptions and customization services. In our blog post, you can learn more about the hidden cost of Salesforce implementation.
But talking about licenses, Experience Cloud has three types of plans: Customer Communities, Partner Relationship Management, and External Apps.
This plan is offered in two versions: Customer Community ($2 per login or $5 per member per month) and Customer Community Plus ($6 per login or $15 per member per month). It is worth mentioning that all Salesforce plans are paid for the whole year upfront.
Customer Community includes a standard set for managing client communities, such as:
Customer Community Plus differs from its cheaper version by enabling users to set up roles and customize sharing rules, reports, dashboards, and delegated system administration.
This plan is available only in one version and will cost you $10 per login or $25 per member per month, which you should pay for the whole year upfront. It includes:
For this pricing plan, you will pay $15 per login or $35 per member per month. With External Apps, you’ll be able to create custom portals, sites, and apps, customize channel programs and track KPIs.
On top of the functionality available in previous plans, the External Apps plan allows:
Also, all Experience Cloud licenses include access to Salesforce Content Management System, unlimited content records, content types submission, and supported channels.
Salesforce Experience Cloud is one of the most potent portal solutions available. It can enhance customer and partner management by making it an exciting and engaging journey. This versatile tool can be tailored for any business vertical and align with your industry’s best practices.
With Salesforce Experience Cloud, companies can drive more sales by connecting their employees with their distributors, resellers, and suppliers in one place.
So, if you want to optimize the costs of running your sales and customer support teams and, at the same time, increase customer satisfaction, Experience Cloud is the perfect solution for you.
But if you feel that its implementation and customization are too much for you, we will help you take the maximum of this investment. Our experts will analyze your business requirements and deliver solutions beyond your expectations. Let’s start the journey to your digital revolution today!
Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) is a digital experience platform released in 2014 and built on the Customer 360 platform. With Salesforce Experience, you can build online communities for customers, partners, or employees and engage better with your audiences.
Salesforce launched Community Cloud in 2014, and in 2021 it was rebranded as Salesforce Experience Cloud. Salesforce highlighted that Experience Cloud’s primary mission to deliver a better online experience for various communities.
Salesforce Communities (now Salesforce Experience Cloud) is a product suite released in 2014 to streamline the building of branded customer, partner, and employee portals, help centers, and knowledge bases.
Anzhelika is a seasoned B2B content marketing strategist with extensive experience in elevating corporate profiles through compelling content. At Ascendix, she offers a wealth of knowledge in Salesforce consulting, providing valuable tips, tricks, and comprehensive guides. Additionally, Anzhelika stays at the forefront of the industry, delivering expert analysis on the latest Salesforce tools and emerging technology trends.
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