Why would you need Salesforce Experience Cloud?

 What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform that is integrated with Salesforce and allows companies to engage with customers, partners, and employees. In simple words, Experience Cloud consists of Experience Sites, which are in fact online portals or websites hosted by Salesforce. Experience Cloud sites are easily created, maintainable, and beautifully branded digital experiences. Digital experience, by definition, is an interaction between users (partners, employees, or customers) that is possible and powered by digital technologies. This definition perfectly describes the purpose and usage of the Experience Cloud.  

Benefits of a Salesforce Experience Cloud include:

• Security – Experience Cloud owners can impose the company’s specific security levels to approved users. As such, they can monitor and adapt these security levels dependent on the clouds’ intended usage. For users, this typically means that they are only able to view their own data, unless identified as general informational content. 

• Control – As owners of the Experience Cloud, you can decide whether to impose the same level of privacy for all users, along with the ability to change, develop and manage user configurations, unlike on a public cloud where you accept the settings provided. You can apply specific rules to user generated content, which allows for a more effective moderation method. This method benefits the cloud in restricting unsolicited or inappropriate content. 

• Compliance – As owners of the Experience Cloud, you can impose any type of compliance or processes for the users.  You are able to determine if users are adhering to these compliances along with reviewing and approving any deviation request. 

• Flexibility – Experience Cloud is very selective on the type of users allowed to engage, typically company’s clients, and it is easy to monitor growth per account. It makes it manageable to scale services, hardware, and personnel. 

• Access – Clients, partners and resellers have access to the Experience Cloud 365 days per year, providing access to guidance documentation, FAQ, currently trending topics, announcements, and user specific data. A FAQ can be setup to minimize search complexity. Through Experience Cloud, you can maintain and upload common topics of interest, auto generate pages and post recommendation content. 

• Focus – Experience Cloud users can address the needs of a user group specific to the company’s business. Users can create unique experiences related to a company’s brand and alignment with clients. A rewards program for most active users can be created to encourage further engagement. 

• Branding – Through Experience cloud, organizations can reflect brand identity. A user’s profile determines how marketing assets are pre-populated and personalized. They can edit user profiles, addresses, and logos that are then captured in Salesforce, keeping content aligned. This type of action reduces the level of activity needed to maintain accurate updates within Experience Cloud and Salesforce. 

Experience Cloud was formerly known as Community Cloud. One existing question is – is this only a name change? In fact, it is not. Experience cloud enables – building support and partner portals, knowledge base, forums, mobile apps – and it is much more than just a community.