What is Salesforce Experience Cloud? Real Use Cases Examples

In today's technology-driven world, genuine relationships and personal interactions are still crucial for business success.

Many businesses strive to provide excellent customer support, but they often struggle to understand what users need because they lack practical communication tools.

Salesforce Experience Cloud can help bridge these gaps and offer better customer-focused support.

In this blog, we will explore what Salesforce Experience Cloud is, its features, and its benefits. Read on!

Salesforce Experience Cloud helps over 2,000 businesses with their help centers, customer service portals, and partner communities. Since its launch in 2014, Experience Cloud has changed how companies like Glassdoor, Poshmark, and Goodreads manage their portals. It attracts over 10 million website visits monthly and has 50 million active community members. 

In our blog post, we will explain:

• What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

• Experience Cloud key features and license pricing,

• How can you customize it for industries like real estate or property management?

Learn more: Experience The Salesforce Experience Cloud

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud, previously called Community Cloud, is a digital platform that helps businesses create online spaces for their customers, partners, and employees. This platform enables smooth communication and easy sharing of data among all users.

This platform provides tools and services to create mobile apps, websites, and online communities. These resources help improve customer interactions and let you manage them across different channels.

This tool combines features of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Content Management System (CMS), and ready-made apps to help you create solutions for any business need. You can use its simple, low-code options to design personalized and engaging experiences for your customers.

Salesforce Community Cloud includes key features from several Salesforce products:

• Marketing Cloud: Tools for digital marketing, like email, social media, and mobile marketing.

• Service Cloud: A platform for customer service and support, offering live chat, case management, and knowledge management.

• Commerce Cloud: A platform for managing online shopping, including product catalogs, shopping carts, and order management.

Key Salesforce Experience Cloud Features

According to a Salesforce report, using Salesforce Experience Cloud can boost customer satisfaction by 32%. This product suite also helps:

• Resolve support tickets quicker,

• Better understand and manage customer communities,

• Increase onsite user engagement.

You can achieve all this with the full features of Experience Cloud. So, what will you find in it?

Personalization

Customers are more likely to choose a brand that offers a personalized experience. Brands that connect with customers on a personal level build engagement and loyalty more quickly. To achieve this, you need to understand the customer’s purchase history, behaviors, interests, and needs.

Using Salesforce Experience Cloud helps businesses connect easily with customers, clients, and remote employees. The personalization feature lets you create experiences that your customers and business teams can relate to.

You can use advanced AI to suggest interest groups to your customers and teams. This helps you provide relevant and customizable information that better engages them.

Business Integration

Experience Cloud supports seamless integration with third-party systems and apps, allowing you to share data across sales, marketing, service, and product development teams. This connectivity simplifies processes like case submissions for customers, lead qualification for partners, and collaboration for employees, ultimately creating a more intelligent and more connected customer journey.

Customization with Experience Builder

With Experience Builder, you can easily design branded portals without writing any code. Make simple customizations like logos, colors, and content to reflect your brand identity. You can create multiple tailored experiences within the same site, adjusting pages, menus, and components based on the needs of different users.

Salesforce Automation

Experience Cloud automates many sales processes for partners and teams, providing real-time updates and easy access to leads, pricing quotes, order information, and inventory. It also lets you control user permissions and manage deal statuses, helping teams close deals faster and more efficiently. Integration with third-party apps adds further flexibility.

E-commerce Capabilities

This feature helps businesses present their products in the right place, at the right time, across different channels like web, mobile, and social media. It makes product information visible within social feeds or discussions, boosting upselling opportunities. Upcoming enhancements will allow building full e-commerce shops right within Experience Cloud.

Case Escalation

Customers can create cases directly in the community platform. Other customers, teams, and experts can then answer these cases. The best answer is highlighted at the top based on user voting, which shows if the answer was helpful. If a question remains unanswered, support agents address it privately or publicly, making it visible to other users.

This brings together customers, employees, and experts to support one another and create strong connections around shared interests. 

Actions

Take the right action at the right time. This feature helps you easily navigate to the next action you should take. You can also create a custom action for what you want to do next.

To make it easy to connect with a third-party application, you can create an action directly in the feed. You can easily access this option from a simple drop-down menu.

You can easily deploy and test the actions to make sure they work correctly.

Salesforce Content Management System

You can create and save content directly on the Salesforce platform.

Topics and Recommendations

After creating the content, organize it by topics to show your audience the latest recommendations. You can base these recommendations on what is popular, the target age group, and any featured content they can follow or subscribe to.

Reports and Dashboards

The Community Management Console has dashboards that show how engaged your clients are with the community. You can analyze this data to understand your community better and improve your service.

Benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud is the best solution for improving skills and making interactions easier.

Enhanced Collaboration Between Customers And Partners

Successful businesses build strong relationships with their customers and partners. It helps them grow over time. Salesforce Community Cloud provides a platform for easy collaboration and quick access to support. Users can share valuable resources and exchange information within communities, increasing brand awareness and showing customers that you care about their needs. 

An Opportunity To Improve Your Products And Services

Your business teams can gather feedback and opinions from customers using this Customer Community platform. It provides a simple way to collect customer feedback by analyzing the discussions and comments they share.

You can use this platform to check the current market potential of your products and services. It helps you track new market trends and analyze how customers’ buying habits change. This information can help you customize or launch new products and improve your existing ones.

Establishing Better Grounds For Customer Support

You can create reports for different communities and analyze data based on various factors. This platform helps you gather customer feedback, allowing you to address their questions and issues effectively.

You can check how well your teams are helping customers and identify areas for improvement. By reviewing this information, you can enhance your customer service practices and respond to customer questions more accurately and efficiently.

Easy Integration 

With Experience Cloud, you can use Salesforce’s built-in integration or connect third-party solutions and apps using APIs. No matter which option you choose, make sure it gives your users the access and permissions they need when they need them.

These integrations help you make better use of your customer data. They improve your abilities and allow you to provide excellent services and support when it matters most.

Improved Productivity Across Teams 

Experience Cloud helps your teams work better by making it easier to create and manage portals.

Using pre-built components, your teams can create portals without starting from scratch. Non-technical team members can also contribute to the development process through low-code tools, sharing their insights. Additionally, your website pages will automatically use the selected theme, which saves time on development. Automation streamlines your sales activities across all areas, leading to increased productivity. 

Engage Remote Work Employees

Experience Cloud is a cloud platform that allows employees to access and manage it from anywhere. It makes it easy for remote employees to interact and share data. They can collaborate easily to address business challenges and understand key performance indicators (KPIs) without needing to be on the system all the time.

Better Manage Partners

Salesforce Experience Cloud makes managing customers and clients easier than ever. It improves lead generation and sales processes to provide an excellent experience for customers at every stage of their journey. It also helps with onboarding, recruiting, training, and supporting partners by offering user-friendly features and tools in the Salesforce portal for a smooth user experience.

What You Can Create With Salesforce Experience Cloud for Different Industries

Help Center & FAQ Portal

Help Centers provide customers with quick answers through forums, self-service portals, or knowledge bases. You can also personalize the system interface by customizing the template in Experience Builder. Choose your company’s branding style or a pre-set theme matching your brand.

Property managers can use Experience Cloud as a virtual service center. They can manage service requests and answer questions about property maintenance. They can also store and share client documents and manage legal processes.

Customer Account Portals

In Experience Cloud, you can create an easy-to-use portal. This portal lets users view content, update their profiles, and manage cases and claims. Your customers will have direct access to data and processes, allowing them to find information and complete actions.

With Experience Cloud, you can build loyal communities and reward top users who support others. For example, eCommerce customers can use the platform to:

• Buy products from stores,

• Share their feedback,

• Suggest product/service improvements,

• Process warranties,

• Make self-service claims.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Partner Portal

You can create a good solution for managing your partner's collaboration. Set up training and certification programs to track how your partners are doing. Partners can:

• Streamline lead distribution in a new portal,

• Reduce lead overlap,

• Requalify leads,

• Simplify quotations.

Companies can use a central digital platform to manage many investors and growers in agriculture. They can securely share financial files and collaborate via chats or Slack communication, which helps different groups receive personalized messages. It allows you to keep all communication history in one place and quickly resolve issues as they come up. Employees can get real-time alerts when a lead turns into a sale, spot patterns in different situations, and adjust the sales process as needed.

You can teach partners automatically by using Einstein AI to suggest the right content and files they need.

Brokers can use a portal to find product information and enroll in training and certification courses to improve their knowledge. For example, Pernod Ricard, a well-known beverage company, used Experience Cloud to collaborate effectively with liquor distributors. 

They built separate communities for their brands’ customers, each reflecting the unique spirit of that group.

Employee Community

Digital spaces help teams work together more effectively, especially when they are working remotely. You can organize teams based on project goals or events. Experience Cloud makes it easier to share data and documents by restricting access to only those who need it. This way, employees can collaborate on files without the risk of them getting corrupted.

Consider creating an FAQ portal or help center to provide easy access to critical information for HR, IT, and other departments. It will be a central place for storing guides and troubleshooting materials, which your employees can use when they need help.

Microsites and Landing Pages

You can create attractive microsites and landing pages to attract leads for a new product launch, an upcoming event, and more. For example, commercial real estate companies can host webinars or conferences and promote them on landing pages to share with all their partners.

Custom Solutions

Salesforce offers a wide range of customization options beyond its standard features. For example, land brokers can create detailed listings on Experience Cloud portals. These listings can work with websites, mapping services, chat features, and online forms.

Land buyers can easily find options by sorting them by Zip Code and viewing all properties within a certain distance. Agents can improve this process with a custom design that is easy to use, allows them to add necessary information, and work with clients in the system. By using a single data source, brokers can manage the sales pipeline based on price, location, and purpose.

They can customize offers for specific customers and engage them by sending relevant content with the proposal. Salesforce Experience Cloud meets various industry needs, making it a leader in portal software. However, if you have little technical experience with such projects, it’s best to leave it to professionals like Codleo.

We have over 6 years of experience creating effective Salesforce solutions based on our clients’ ideas. We have worked closely with key Salesforce Clouds since they began. It helps us understand the platform's details and how it can evolve.

With our strong background in custom software development for PropTech and CRE Tech, you can trust that you'll find the best Salesforce Experience Cloud consultant.

We will help you get the most out of Salesforce, whether you want to use the standard Experience Cloud features or create a custom solution. Our team includes over 200 certified Salesforce experts, such as consultants, developers, solution architects, business analysts, and QA professionals, who will ensure your platform runs smoothly. Learn more about the Salesforce services we offer.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Statistics

Thousands of businesses around the world use Salesforce Experience Cloud. It has made a noticeable impact, with over 10 million digital experiences created on the platform. Experience Cloud helps companies provide smooth and engaging portals for customers, partners, and employees.

A Salesforce report found that 88% of customers believe an excellent experience is just as crucial as the quality of the product or service.

Similarly, 81% of businesses say customer experience sets them apart from competitors. Marketers also prioritize delivering a unified customer journey, with 86% seeing it as a key objective.

Personalization plays a huge role, too, as 56% of customers prefer offers that are tailored specifically to their needs. Thanks to these capabilities, Experience Cloud serves a diverse range of industries with major companies like Accenture, American Express, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Unilever among its users.

These numbers and companies highlight how Salesforce Experience Cloud is shaping the future of connected and personalized digital experiences.

Salesforce Experience Cloud Licenses Pricing Comparison

Let’s talk about Salesforce Experience Cloud license types and their costs. The good news is that if you are an experienced Salesforce user or have someone in-house who can set it up, you will only pay for the number of licenses you need. Unlike many software companies, Salesforce does not charge setup fees for new users, so the costs are clear.

If you need to adapt Salesforce Experience Cloud to meet your specific needs but lack the in-house expertise, you might have to hire a consultant for implementation. This means you will need to pay for subscriptions and customization services. Our blog post lets you learn more about the hidden costs of implementing Salesforce.

However, Experience Cloud offers three types of plans regarding licenses: Customer Communities, Partner Relationship Management, and External Apps.

Self-Service Customer Community

This plan has two options: Customer Community and Customer Community Plus. 

The Customer Community costs $2 per login or $5 per monthly member. 
Customer Community Plus costs $6 per login or $15 per monthly member. 

Remember that all Salesforce plans must be paid upfront for the entire year.

Customer Community includes a standard set for managing client communities, such as:

• A customer portal,

• Advanced case management,

• Lightning Flow automation,

• Audience targeting,

• Automated content recommendation,

• Chatter integration.

Customer Community Plus allows users to create roles and customize sharing rules, reports, dashboards, and system administration. This version is more advanced than the cheaper option.

Partner Relationship Management

This plan has one option and costs $10 for each login or $25 for each monthly member. You need to pay the full amount for the year in advance. The plan includes:

• A pre-built partner portal feature called Partner Central Template,

• Customizable workflows for automated lead distribution and deal registration,

• Pre-designed campaigns, partner channel analytics,

• Customizable reports and dashboards,

• Automation for fund requests, approvals, and claims.

External Apps

With this pricing plan, you will pay $15 for each login or $35 for each member monthly. Using External Apps, you can create custom portals, sites, and apps, set up channel programs, and track key performance indicators (KPIs).

On top of the functionality available in previous plans, the External Apps plan allows:

• The creation of up to 100 custom objects,

• Adjustment of the platform with low-code builders,

• Facilitation of customer and partner access with access management and identity services,

• Enhancement of the platform with data storage.

All Experience Cloud licenses include access to the Salesforce Content Management System. You can create unlimited content records, submit different types of content, and use supported channels.

Final Words

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a powerful portal solution that helps manage customers and partners better. It creates an engaging experience for users. This flexible tool can be customized for any business type and aligns with industry best practices.

With Salesforce Experience Cloud, companies can boost sales by connecting employees with distributors, resellers, and suppliers all in one place.

If you want to reduce the costs of running your sales and customer support teams while improving customer satisfaction, Experience Cloud is the right choice.

If implementing and customizing our solutions overwhelms you, we can help you maximize your investment. Our experts will analyze your business needs and provide solutions that exceed your expectations. Let's begin your digital transformation today!