Sometimes customers want to be able to help themselves. This is why you might want to know more about Salesforce Experience Cloud.
Organisations use Salesforce products to fulfil an increasingly diverse range of requirements. For many, it is the primary database and business process management platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud opens up that functionality to people outside of an organisation and allows them to serve themselves.
In the past few years, I have used Salesforce Experience Cloud to build applications like exclusive private social networks, highly customised customer service platforms, quick-to-launch multi-step information gathering tools, and much more. Building on this experience, I hope to use this post to help you understand how to be successful with Salesforce Experience Cloud.
Experience Cloud is a comprehensive set of tools that allow you to create digital experiences, such as websites and apps, that seamlessly integrate with Salesforce hosted data and processes.
At its core it is a simple drag and drop website builder. This allows administrators to build mobile responsive pages and application structures using pre-defined templates and components. However, its power extends far beyond this. Extensive customisation options, both clicks and code, allow for the creation of advanced, branded, consumer-facing web applications.
In short, it is an ideal platform for CRM-connected websites, portals, communities, self-service applications, and much more.
Experience Cloud is powerful and feature rich, which makes it a tempting choice for a wide range of applications. But it is important to be critical and think carefully about how those features align with your objectives and whether the investment required to implement and maintain them will give you the return you want.
A good example here is our own 21AT12 company website. We launched with the ambition of becoming the best Salesforce Experience Cloud agency in the world, so surely our own website would be built using Salesforce Experience Cloud?! Well, it isn’t. We wanted a simple, brand-aligned, content-focused website to showcase our business. We didn’t require functionality like user logins and complex form filling. Ultimately, it was quicker and easier for us to use Webflow.
Where Experience Cloud excels is around interaction with data, processes, and other people. What I mean by that is that it is a brilliant platform upon which to build a private social network, a university application system, a student management system, an online portal for an energy supplier, etc. If your use case requires a lot of information exchange with external parties, I would strongly encourage you to evaluate Salesforce Experience Cloud. Chances are, it will be a good fit.
You can think about Salesforce Experience Cloud as a way to give external users access to a limited part of your Salesforce implementation. For example, if you are a car insurance company you will want to let consumers get a quote for, buy and manage their car insurance. However, these will be small parts of the broader process that supports the whole lifecycle of a policy.
A new portal built on a flawed Salesforce application risks exposing those inefficiencies to external customers. Therefore, you should get the process and system working as effectively as possible before you start work building your Salesforce Experience Cloud site.
Beyond this, we need to carefully consider data security. An internal Salesforce implementation may not have been designed to consider external users. Therefore, it is important to carefully review and modify any parts of that application architecture that could result in those external users gaining unauthorised access to sensitive data. Again, this should be done before starting work on a Salesforce Experience Cloud application.
Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform for building rich, consumer-facing digital experiences. They will most likely be used by your customers and, as a result, they should be designed to meet the expectations that those people have for a digital product. Therefore, you must consider design, usability and accessibility.
Is the look and feel of your new digital experience consistent with your organisation’s brand? Is the app intuitive and can users achieve what they need without experiencing too much cognitive drain? Does the app conform to the accessibility standards that so many users rely on, such as WCAG 2.0 AA?
Internal Salesforce implementations only have to think about these things in a very limited way. Subsequently, the people who did a great job with that internal Salesforce implementation may not have the skill sets required to build truly great Salesforce Experience Cloud apps. Make sure you have a team that not only knows about Salesforce, but also design, user experience and accessibility.
Salesforce Experience Cloud offers a powerful platform for building engaging, user-friendly digital experiences that seamlessly integrate with your existing Salesforce data and processes. However, it's crucial to approach your Experience Cloud project with careful consideration of your use case, a carefully thought out Salesforce application backend, and a well-executed focus on user experience.
By addressing these key factors, you can harness the full potential of Experience Cloud and create exceptional digital experiences that translate into happy customers. With the right approach, Salesforce Experience Cloud can be a game-changer.
Need Salesforce Experience Cloud experts with a proven track record?Get in touch!